


The Conservation of Fame

by Lomonaaeren



Series: Conservation of Fame [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Humor, M/M, Mind Control, Mistaken Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 09:15:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 55,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry has secured some peace from the wizarding world the only way he can, using a spell that makes all but his closest friends remember the concept of the Boy-Who-Lived but forget about him as a person. It’s a nice life—until Malfoy stumbles through his wards, pursued by mysterious enemies, and Harry finds himself unable to refuse him help. Help that, in the end, could teach Malfoy that Harry isn’t the stranger Malfoy thinks he is, and make things unforgivable between them again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Wonderful Life

“Excuse me…”  
  
Harry looked up with a smile. He’d been sorting through the flowers on the stall in front of him, trying to decide which ones would look best in his garden. He would never have Neville’s level of skill in Herbology, but since the war, he’d picked up enough of the art to make plants bloom where he put them.  
  
The young woman in front of him flushed when she saw him looking, and licked her lips. “I—I hate to bother you,” she squeaked. “But you look _so_ much like someone, I just had to ask you if you were.”  
  
“Now that you can see my face, you know that I’m not, right?” Harry asked, with a broader smile that he hoped hid the chaos of his heartbeat. The spell worked to protect him, day and night, winding through the minds of everyone in the wizarding world who had known him as an idea and not a person, but still there was always the fear that _this_ would be the day it failed, that he would meet someone who stared at him and blurted out his title instead of his name.  
  
“I, of course,” the woman in front of him said, and her blush deepened. “But people must have told you that you look like the Boy-Who-Lived before now, right?”  
  
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” Harry said, and held out his hand, performing a quick Cleaning Charm on it before she touched it. Between the calluses and the dirt and the scars from Potions knives that crossed his palm, he must look horrid. “But no. My name’s Harry Potter.”  
  
There was no flicker of recognition in the girl’s eyes, but she shook his hand with enthusiasm. Harry relaxed a little. The spell had separated his name from his ideal, which he was grateful for. He reckoned he could have taken a different name, but he liked his real one, the connection to his parents. He ought to honor his mother in his own memory even if only a few other people in Britain now knew she had been named Lily Evans.  
  
“Glad to meet you,” the woman said. She was older than he had thought at first, Harry noted; there was even a touch of grey in her dark hair as she turned back to the clusters of roses, lilies, irises, hollyhocks, daisies, and others on the stall. Blooming out of season, of course, but that was nothing for a skilled Herbologist, as Harry knew; Neville had brought an enormous train of blooming roses to Ron and Hermione’s wedding in the middle of last December. “I’m Esmeralda Duncan, the owner of this stall. What were you thinking of buying?”  
  
“Flowers that look colorful and that are easy to take care of or alter with spells,” Harry said firmly. “I’m still an apprentice in Herbology, really, and without even a formal teacher to guide me.”  
  
Esmeralda laughed. “One of the ones who wants to do it all yourself?” She picked up a tall, gorgeous flower that Harry had ignored because it looked like an orchid and they were hard to take care of, and grinned at him.  
  
Harry shrugged, unabashed. After the war, he had decided that he wanted to _live_ , and his particular case of it had taken the form of trying to learn everything he could, all at the same time, including most of the subjects he hadn’t cared about in school. Hermione said it made his house and probably his mind look like they were trying to grow in six directions at once, but Harry was happy that way.  
  
“I don’t think I could take care of one like _that_ ,” he said, and nodded to the snow-white orchid in Esmeralda’s hand. “I know that it’s beyond me.”  
  
“You’d think it would be, but a flower like this actually needs commitment more than anything else,” Esmeralda said, and stroked up the stem. The blossoms on top, which resembled a springing pair of bridges, swayed in response.  
  
“Yeah, commitment to learning all the different kinds of sunlight and soil and water it requires,” Harry muttered, shaking his head. “No, thanks.”  
  
Esmeralda eyed him curiously. “You don’t care enough about flowers to learn that much about them?”  
  
“I’m in this out of interest,” Harry answered, meeting her eyes and smiling again, so that she wouldn’t think he was being stubborn for stubbornness’s sake. “The more like a chore it becomes, the less I’m interested.”  
  
“Or like an essay,” Esmeralda said, and shuddered. “Were you at Hogwarts when Professor Snape was teaching Potions? Those three-foot essays he used to assign on the properties of dreambane? _Ugh_. Those were the worst.”  
  
It still wasn’t easy for Harry to talk about Professor Snape, but on the other hand, he could hear the war and the most important figures in it mentioned in casual conversation and not sweat about it. It was at least easier than having the people around him think he _was_ one of those figures. He nodded. “And the ones about the differences between asphodel and wormwood, and why they were important to the bases of potions.”  
  
“There was someone who never would have thought Potions could be a hobby,” Esmeralda muttered, and shuddered again. “He would have said that it was a calling and nothing else.” She glanced up and down the part of Diagon Alley that had become more or less a continuous open-air market since the war. “I think I can hear him now, raving about what dunderheads he had to teach.”  
  
Harry chuckled. “He gave the same speech to the first-years every time, didn’t he?”  
  
“He did.” Esmeralda paused for a moment, with a small smile that made Harry wonder if she had been a Slytherin. Then she held out the orchid to Harry a little more insistently. “Anyway. What I meant wasn’t that you had to make a commitment to study all the different kinds of needs that a flower like this might normally have. I meant it needs trust. Love. It’s a very special kind of flower.”  
  
Harry spent a moment considering the ghostly thing, and then filled his mind with its beauty and reached out.  
  
As his fingers skimmed down the stem, it trembled and quivered, and then one of the large white petals, which resembled the edge of a cloud, reached down and curled around his finger.  
  
Esmeralda took a step backwards, and then seemed to remember that she was holding the slender thing, half-pot and half-vase, out of which the orchid grew, and laughed shakily. “There! It likes you, Mr. Potter. Who would have thought it would take to someone who didn’t want to commit to it that easily?” She flashed him an arch glance that had more than a hint of wonder in it.  
  
Harry shrugged at her. He had no instinctive talent for Herbology or Care of Magical Creatures, but he had realized, since the war, that he was pretty good with magical animals and plants like this and taking care of things in general. Maybe it was because he wanted a peaceful life, and they generally agreed with him.  
  
“Are you sure that you won’t take this flower, Mr. Potter?” Esmeralda urged him quietly, leaning towards him. “It likes you, and I think you’re someone who would put in the time to learn anything about it that you didn’t know yet.” Her smile flashed out like the light in her eyes, and revealed the dimple in her cheek. “As long as it remained an interest for you, a hobby.”  
  
Harry nodded in response, his eyes wandering over the flower once more. Its petals had swung towards him, and it no longer looked like a pair of joined bridges, but a rising storm of congealed snow out of a broken globe. “Yes. I’ll take it.”  
  
Then there was a bustle of bargaining and Galleons and wrapping and instructions, and Harry also bought a few lilies to add to his gardens. It seemed that he was going to have a white theme going this year. Well, the lilies were in tribute to his mother, too. That eased his minor winces regarding the cost.  
  
He walked away from the stall poorer, but more satisfied, and waited to cross a swathe of the alley filled with a crowd watching an impromptu duel. No one turned to look at him for any other reason than the giant orchid hovering above his head in an Unbreakable Bubble, and it was the flower that earned all the stares, not him.  
  
Harry could feel his lips twitching, and bit them before someone could wonder why he was grinning like an idiot.  
  
 _This_ was the life he had wanted. No one cared about him unless they already had—and as a person, not a symbol or a savior—before the spell swept in. Yes, it was a form of mind control, and there were times that Harry woke up at night in a sweat about it, because it had invaded his dreams.  
  
But everyone could still remember the proper history of the war. They just didn’t know names, and they all assumed that the Boy-Who-Lived was someone else, someone not named Harry Potter. But then, the papers and the people in the street had used his title more than his name, anyway. And the emblem of the Chosen One was his lightning bolt scar. Harry didn’t have it, and therefore he couldn’t be the one it identified.  
  
The lightning bolt scar had been the anchor of the spell, in fact.  
  
The duel in front of him cleared up, and Harry set out for the Apparition point again, whistling. The flowers bobbed along with him, and all he had to worry about was ensuring that the Levitation Charms on their containers didn’t tangle.  
  
 _A change,_ he thought, _a change indeed from stalkers and people breaking into my bedroom to declare their undying love and the_ Prophet _insisting that my wards needed to be discussed in detail because I belonged to “all of Britain.”_  
  
Harry rolled his eyes as he thought about that. He could have been a lot safer if the Ministry had acted to restrain the reporters, but of course even in the Ministry there were people who believed in freedom of the press above individual safety, and people who didn’t think that Harry was in any real danger from his obsessed fans, and people who plain didn’t like him.  
  
Harry rubbed his right arm as he turned the corner and saw the Apparition point ahead of him. A faint scar ran down the length of it, from shoulder to wrist, barely visible even in the light of a bright summer’s day like this one. That had come from a Parkinson cousin’s curse, someone who wanted to “avenge the humiliation” that her family had allegedly been put through as a result of the Wizengamot’s ruling that Pansy Parkinson couldn’t return to Hogwarts to repeat her last year.  
  
The curse had been designed to prevent the blood from clotting, so the victim would bleed to death in minutes from a large enough wound. Harry had put up extra wards across his chimney, the way that Louisa Parkinson had come in, or he would have died.  
  
And then, the next day, the _Prophet_ had shrieked that they had a right to know about the extra wards, too, because Harry’s life was everyone’s life. That story had run right next to the story of the attack.  
  
 _My life is everybody's, right,_ Harry thought, snorting to himself, as he dodged around a cluster of people who appeared to be taking photographs of the Apparition point. Hopefully they weren't the first troops of an invading army, but even if they were, it was going to be someone else's bloody duty to stop them. _But they didn't think that when it came to facing Voldemort._  
  
That had been when the hypocrisy finally got to be too much for him and he simply walked away. Turned his back, said good-bye to all that, marched. And the spell had covered his tracks, had ensured that people knew what had happened and even who had done it--in theory, in idea. They just didn't name names to themselves, and tended to focus more on those people who had done other recognizable, identifiable things. Hermione. Ron. Neville. Ginny. Even Ollivander, who had been in the Malfoys' dungeons.  
  
And Harry was pleased with that. They had all done more than he had, endured more trials, either at Hogwarts or struggling with their own doubt and faith along the journey. Harry had been sure he knew what he was doing up until the point he had to walk into the Forbidden Forest and die, and in the end, he had survived that, too. He _deserved_ a little peace.  
  
It was always a delicate task, Apparating with several different kinds and weights of plants, but Esmeralda had put some protective spells on all of them, and Harry managed. He settled down to an afternoon of working in the garden with a faint smile on his face.  
  
*  
  
He ate dinner outside, since it was a beautiful day, a little rain that morning and nothing since but the sky still covered with clouds. He lounged in the back garden, which had a piled-rock wall around it and herbs and flowers of several different kinds exploding in all directions, while he watched the sunset. The cottage sat behind him, wrapped in wards snug enough to make the stone hum and comfortable enough to ensure that Harry would sleep anyway.  
  
Harry sipped the soup he'd made earlier that afternoon from a china bowl that had been a present from Mrs. Weasley and counted the clouds he could see that were shaped like something. There, a swinging anchor, outlined in purple and orange. Here, a dissolving horse's head with big blue eyes that appeared through tattered patches in it. Almost overhead, a curling figure that Harry could see as a sleeping dragon with its head on its flank, above its coiled tail, if he squinted. The chicken soup finished, he set the bowl aside and put his hands behind his head.  
  
Ordinarily, he would have been eating dinner with Ron and Hermione tonight, but Ron had had a rough week among the Aurors--which translated, Harry knew from Hermione's careful words, to someone almost killing him--and they needed time alone. That was all right with Harry, too. Since the casting of the spell, he had relaxed so much that sometimes he thought he was a different person, at least to himself. Someone who could put up with a lot, change his plans at a moment's notice, and learn hobbies without caring if those hobbies were going to be useful for a fight.  
  
He let his head droop sideways and closed his eyes against the light that made dancing spots in the air, humming under his breath.  
  
The next moment, he had bolted to his feet and was staring around the garden, his wand in his hand faster than it had been since the days when he was still trying to be an Auror, his breath and heartbeat shaking him like a rag between them.  
  
Something had battered against his wards.  
  
That _should not_ have happened, no matter what else did. No one knew he lived here except friends Harry thought could be trusted with the secret. His enemies had no reason to attack a random house in the middle of nowhere; his enemies, like the rest of the wizarding world who didn't _really_ know him and love him at the time the spell went up, no longer knew he existed. And even if someone had conceived a grudge against Harry Potter the potterer, the dabbler in hobbies neither exotic nor threatening, they couldn't have followed him back or come close to the wards without him noticing.  
  
Harry paused and listened, waiting. He reckoned it could have been an accident, in a way. The Ministry occasionally took its Auror and Hit Wizard trainees out into the middle of unfrequented hills and downs in order to instruct them in dangerous spells. Maybe--  
  
No, there it _was_ again. And this was a targeted attack, a hurled curse that made Harry's bones and teeth ache. Someone had come here with the intention of destroying his home.  
  
Harry stalked into his house, through the dining room where he usually lingered to look through the large windows, and the drawing room that had a cheerful fire always burning, and the front room that he had turned into a combination potions lab and conservatory. The wards that had taken the blow were at the front of the house. Already boiling with fury, with disturbed peace, with magic, Harry flung open the door and burst out into the open with murder on his tongue.  
  
His glorious charge came to nothing when he tripped over something invisible and crashed heavily to the ground. But even that kind of surprise couldn't dull his instincts, and all his instincts had come back with a vengeance. Harry rolled and came back to his feet, literally hopping up with his wand aimed and his teeth bared.  
  
Nothing. The front garden, where he grew vegetables for his dinner and his more and more skilled attempts at cooking, was as quiet as the back. Harry could feel the wards shaking from the blast unleashed against them, but he could see no crack in them, large or hairline. It was as if his enemies, whoever they were, had taken the time and courtesy to repair them on their way out.  
  
Harry turned his head in a slow circle, nostrils wide, scenting as well as he could what had happened. Then he remembered what he had tripped over and whirled towards the doorway, casting a _Finite_ nonverbally.  
  
The air in front of the door solidified, wavered as if considering whether it was wise to do so, and then snapped into being. Harry was looking at a wizard who had been under a Disillusionment Charm, a wizard with his arms wrapped around his head and his legs tucked up to his belly as though still trying to defend himself.  
  
He was unconscious, Harry reckoned, from his deep, slow breaths. Still reluctant to touch him, Harry worked himself around until he could peer between those entwined arms and see the bloody, averted face.  
  
That done, Harry felt a blow to his peace that was quite as large as if he had stumbled and literally hit his head.  
  
What the fuck was _Draco Malfoy_ doing on his doorstep?


	2. The Consequences of a Spell

Draco Malfoy lay on the spare bed that Harry kept for times when George shouldn't be alone, or times when Ron and Hermione, as they still sometimes did, had rows so severe that neither of them wanted to go back home that night. Harry stood next to the bed and scowled at him.  
  
Well, he wasn't _completely_ inhuman. He wouldn't leave Malfoy on his doorstep when he was wounded.  
  
And he was. Blood made his milky-blond hair clump together on the back of his skull, and he had long gashes in his arms, as though attacked by something with claws. Maybe that was why he'd been shielding his face. Harry had rolled him over with spells and used the same magic to lift his clothes gingerly, looking under them to see if he had other wounds that should be treated. He couldn't really see any, though.  
  
So, for the moment, Harry had stopped the bleeding, cleaned out the cuts on his arms and the back of his head, forced a little Strengthening Potion down his throat between lips he had to hold open, and stood there listening to his breathing and trying to decide what the fuck he should do.  
  
The spell would make it possible for him to take Malfoy to St. Mungo's and not have anyone comment on it; they would just see an ordinary man named Harry Potter doing it. It was _Malfoy's_ name that would likely cause comment and staring, and might make some of the Healers, depending on who they got, refuse to treat him.  
  
That was what made Harry hesitate, despite the fact that common sense and a desire to have his peace back both said he should take Malfoy to the Healers. What if his enemies still waited for him out there? What if they could track him to hospital, or find him again once he was there? Harry's wards had suffered damage from them, and he knew that St. Mungo's didn't have protections anywhere near as strong, except perhaps on the Janus Thickey ward. And _those_ were there to protect other people from the patients, for the most part, not patients from them.  
  
It was a conundrum.  
  
Malfoy groaned and rolled over, aiming his face towards Harry. Harry paused, his heart drumming so urgently that for a moment he thought he would suffocate. Then he shook his head and told himself not to be so stupid. The spell would hold for Malfoy, too. He didn't know _who_ Harry was, only _what_ he was. And Harry had sent his fame elsewhere, mostly to other real people.  
  
Malfoy's eyes opened. Harry scrutinized them carefully. He knew that, sometimes, a blow on the back of the head could make someone blind.  
  
But Malfoy didn't look as though he had that problem. He was staring at Harry, his eyes steadily widening, and their color seemed to be the same as far as Harry could remember, that bright pale grey. Harry hadn't had any reason to pay attention to Malfoy's eyes in years.  
  
"You're safe," Harry said quietly. "I don't know how you got through my wards--" another question to ask when Malfoy had some reason to trust him more "--but you did, and your enemies didn't. I'll treat your wounds, and then I'll take you anywhere you ask. You can go back to sleep if you'd like."  
  
Malfoy didn't respond, and Harry wondered if he was so distrustful that an offer of help just sounded like a threat to him. He was about to ask what kind of reassurance he could give when Malfoy whispered hoarsely, "Who are you?"  
  
Harry shivered. The spell was holding.  
  
 _Unless the blow on the back of his head made him lose his memory, of course._  
  
Harry shoved the thought away with an inner scowl that he made sure not to let show on his face, and said, with a faint smile, "My name is Harry Potter." He had let his fringe grow long to hang over his scar, although it had faded so much that it was hard to distinguish from less than an inch away and he had ample proof that the spell was strong enough to make people ignore the evidence of their eyes. He didn't think there was anything left for Malfoy to remember him by, if the name didn't trigger memories.  
  
It didn't seem to, since Malfoy's cloudy eyes didn't immediately fill with hatred. Instead, he continued staring, and then repeated, in a voice that scraped and dipped in the middle with urgency, "Who _are_ you?"  
  
"I just told you my name," Harry said, snarling in spite of himself. Malfoy could still irritate him effortlessly, it seemed, and it didn't matter whether they were interacting as Slytherin and Gryffindor or patient and healer. "Anyway. I know yours. That face is distinctive, _Malfoy_. You'll have to decide what to do, though. Your enemies, whoever they are, probably saw you come in here, and they'll be after you soon. Maybe with some assault stronger than my wards can withstand." He turned towards the door of the bedroom. "For now, rest," he added, over his shoulder.  
  
 _And I don't want to move._ This was Harry's home now, every crooked and rambling inch of it. He had decided to make his stand here. That meant no running.  
  
"I need to know who you are before I can make any decision," Malfoy said, in a tone closer to his usual hauteur than any he'd used before.   
  
Harry rolled his eyes at the ceiling. "If you don't know me by that name, then I can't help you," he said, part of him relishing, in spite of himself, how very double-edged some of their words were.  
  
"No French accent," Malfoy mused. "No Bulgarian, either. You _must_ have attended Hogwarts, but why don't I remember you? You look like you're the same age as me. I should have remembered you."  
  
"You think there are only three wizarding schools in Europe?" Harry asked, picking up one of the nest of prepared lies he had worked out with Ron and Hermione just in case anyone ever _did_ come close to discovering the secret of his identity. Ron had collapsed laughing over some of them. Harry looked back at Malfoy and arched his eyebrows. "I'm surprised that someone of your obvious _experience_ still does."  
  
He shut the door on Malfoy's gaping face, and went to fetch him some food and tea from the kitchen, then Floo Ron and Hermione. Harry was over the point where he would run to his friends for help in every trouble, but it still did him good to complain, sometimes.  
  
*  
  
"Malfoy is in your _house_?" Ron made a face that seemed to fill the whole fire. "That's _hard,_ mate."  
  
Hermione, who was beside Ron in the flames, gave Ron a hard look and Harry a tolerant one. "It's good to know that you'll help someone in trouble, Harry," she said quietly. "Even if it is _Malfoy_."  
  
Harry rolled his eyes at her. "You know that I never meant to turn my back on the whole wizarding world when I started living like this, Hermione. Only the ones who turned their backs on _me_ , or never saw the real me in the first place."  
  
"I wondered."  
  
Hermione had helped with the spell that moved Harry's fame away from him and separated his reputation from the body he lived in under protest. She agreed that it was necessary for Harry to do something about the people hunting him and the _Prophet_ harassing him when the Ministry wouldn't, but she still wasn't happy at the thought that the spell affected other people's minds.  
  
But she had done it, because she was his friend, and Harry had to admit that if he had heard about someone else controlling people's minds and living behind powerful wards, he would have questioned their compassion, too. So he let it go, and said, "I don't know what he's in trouble from. Maybe once he's better, he'll want to go somewhere else anyway. It's already driving him mad that he can't figure out who I am."  
  
"Yeah, it would," Ron said, and blinked at him worriedly. "Be careful, mate."  
  
"There's another problem," Hermione said, her eyes wide in the way that meant a new theory had just occurred to her. "The longer he's with you, Harry, the more familiar he'll become with you. The more he'll get to know the real _you_. Eventually, the spell might snap and connect him with his old memories."  
  
Harry paused. Then he said, "Are you sure? Because, really, Hermione, that's not something I worried about. That's--that's weird, to tell you the truth. Why the fuck would he get to know the real me?"  
  
"Because you'll be lying to him in one way, but not another way," Hermione said. "You'll be taking care of him and talking to him in a normal tone of voice and showing him the man he never got the chance to know when you were enemies. That's enough to make someone else fond of you."  
  
Harry laughed and relaxed against the chair that he usually used when he was on the Floo. "For a minute there, you had me worried, Hermione. That's not going to happen this time. Malfoy can't be _fond_ of someone who helps him when he's hurt. His pride is going to be more deeply wounded than anything else by the time he's better." He saluted Hermione with his bottle of Muggle beer. He had spent some time and effort making sure that he could have a fridge that would work with magic. Just because he lived in isolation from the wizarding world didn't mean he had to be without creature comforts. "I'll keep your words in mind in case I ever have to shelter someone else, though."  
  
Hermione didn't look convinced, but Ron broke in before she could talk about it further. "How long do you think it'll be until you can get him out of there, mate?"  
  
"God knows." Harry flipped a lazy hand up and down. He felt much better about the whole thing now that he knew it was probably just a matter of time until he was alone again. "He'll have to recover from his wounds first, and then I need to find out more about his enemies, and whether they'll come after him if I let him out the door. That'll take time, too. He has to trust me enough to tell me. Or at least enough to give me the name of a friend I can leave him with."  
  
"That eager to be rid of me?"  
  
Harry whirled around, landing in a battle-crouch with his wand out before he thought better of it. Well, he wasn't used to being startled in his own home. Given his wards, even Ron and Hermione usually Flooed or owled him before they came over.  
  
Malfoy, swaying and looking far paler than he had when lying down in bed, stood in the middle of the doorway that led to his room. He had hold of the walls with both hands, but the expression of extreme determination stamped on his face was familiar to Harry from sixth year. He might look as if he was about to fall down. He also looked as stubborn as a pig.  
  
"Damn it," Harry muttered, decided from Malfoy's line of sight that he probably hadn't seen Ron and Hermione in the fireplace, and shut the connection with a snapped command. He stood up and moved around the chair, and still Malfoy stood there staring at _him_ , not the hearth. Good. "Yes, actually, I am. You arrived here trailing unknown danger behind you, and there's no reason to think I can take the best care of you. I'm not a trained Healer."  
  
"But you're what I have," Malfoy said, his eyes unwavering now, despite the shadowy color in them and on his cheeks. "And I--I can't remember _everything_ , but I know that I was trying to Apparate to a place of safety. You're it. Even if I don't know why, I know I'm safe here." He took a deep breath, and then released it in that eternal question. "Who are you?"  
  
"Har. Ry. Pot. Ter." Harry tried it slower this time, just in case that would imprint the truth on Malfoy's absurd brain.  
  
"But I _know_ you," Malfoy said, and took a step away from the doorframe. That turned out not to be wise, since his legs promptly crumbled beneath him. Harry sighed, cast a Lightening Charm at the git, and snatched him up, cradling Malfoy against his shoulder as he carried him back into the bedroom. He arranged the sheets for him, and even fluffed the pillows, before he wrestled Malfoy into it. Malfoy didn't do anything to fight him, but he didn't help, either, content to just lie there and stare at Harry with wide eyes.  
  
"You must know me," he whispered. "You must hate me. No one who doesn't hate me would talk like you do, as if he despised me merely for existing."  
  
"There's a class of people," Harry said, dragging the sheets up over Malfoy's legs and noting as he did so that Malfoy had let his toenails grow long, as if he'd been on the run for a long time, "who hate being _disbelieved._ No matter how many times I tell you my name, you don't accept it. That's irritating." He smoothed down the sheets again, and then Summoned some more food from the kitchen, bread under a Warming Charm that he'd been saving for his own breakfast in the morning. Well, he could have something else. He arranged the bread on a tray and thrust it at Malfoy. "Here. Eat this."  
  
Malfoy picked it up and took a bite, but his eyes, as motionless as a snake's, never left Harry's. "You take care of me," he said. "And hate me at the same time. A strange combination. I know you can't be a Gryffindor, because I knew all the Gryffindors in my own year, but you act like one."  
  
Harry thought he had managed to keep from flinching when Malfoy mentioned his House, and maintain a calm expression. "Do you want to go to St. Mungo's?" he asked.  
  
"No." Malfoy ate several more bites of the bread, continuing to stare at him. It was extremely creepy. Harry had just decided to step out the door of the room when Malfoy said, "I want to know who you are."  
  
"You discovered me." Harry leaned forwards and lowered his voice, amused to see Malfoy lean forwards at the same time, although he couldn't upset the tray because of some of the charms Harry had placed on it. "I'm actually the long-lost son of Merlin, transported through time to the modern day. I took an ordinary name so no one would discover me and I'm hiding until the moment when England needs me again."  
  
Malfoy opened his mouth, then scowled and shut it. "That lie couldn't fool a Muggle baby, Potter," he muttered, and took another bite of bread, half-shutting his eyes as if he found the taste of thick sweetness near the crisp crust overwhelming. That, and his slenderness, made Harry think he hadn't been eating well for a while.  
  
Harry grinned. "Admit it, you believed it for a second."  
  
Malfoy opened his eyes and looked at him, and this time, his stare didn't have the fixed quality it had had, before. He leaned forwards again, pushing the tray along in front of him, and said in a gentle, strained voice, "Please tell me who you are. When you smile like that, I should know you. I should know how to respond. _Please_." His hand reached out, callused fingers brushing Harry's.  
  
Harry took his hand back and said, "No one, really. I mean it. I probably look like someone you know--sometimes people tell me I look like the Chosen One--but I chose to sit the war out." There. That lie had been one he had picked because it inevitably made people who had fought in the war despise him and want to think more about their own superiority in strength and courage than his identity.  
  
Malfoy went on gazing at him in that same steady, considering way. Harry found himself wondering, given the calluses on his hands and the secret enemies and all, whether he had continued doing dangerous things since the war. Perhaps he had been an Unspeakable? That would explain a lot, including why Harry hadn't heard that much about him in the years just past.  
  
Then Malfoy said, "Wise decision. I would have done that myself, if I could have." He sipped from the glass of water that Harry had placed on the tray with the bread, his gaze still not letting Harry go.  
  
"You don't mean that," Harry said, startled into honesty before he thought about it. "I mean--I've always heard that you fought bravely for your family."  
  
"Oh, at the time I was mad for glory." Malfoy waved a hand and broke off another chunk of bread. "But I was stupid. I should have realized what that glory would consist of." He grinned, apparently enjoying Harry's confusion. "I should have stayed out of it and let the adults fight the war. And the Boy-Who-Lived. He was the one who was always at the center of everything." He snorted and rolled his eyes.  
  
Harry was grateful for the reminder of who Malfoy was, who they both were. It wouldn't do to get too close to him, not when Malfoy was under the spell and didn't, couldn't, know who Harry really was. Harry wouldn't mind getting to know _Malfoy,_ but it would be under false pretenses. Malfoy was talking to a helpful, cowardly stranger, not someone he wanted to be friends with.  
  
He'd finished with the food, so Harry reached out to take the tray. "I think you did the best you could, Malfoy," he settled for saying diplomatically.  
  
"Call me Draco."  
  
Harry glanced up. "What?"  
  
"Call me by my first name." Malfoy gave him a strange smile, crooked and charming in a way that Harry had never imagined it could be. Surely Malfoys never had smiles that were less than straight. They would ruthlessly correct them if they were. It wouldn't do to be less than classically handsome.  
  
 _Just as it wouldn't do for Malfoys to have calluses on their hands or accept help from people they don't know?_  
  
"I want to hear what it sounds like in your voice," Malfoy continued, his words sinking. "Please."  
  
It was a small enough thing in the end. Malfoy would be healed and on his way elsewhere in a few days, Harry was sure now. The bump on the back of his head didn't seem to have affected him much except maybe for his short-term memory, and his wounds weren't as bad as they'd seemed at first glance. So Harry offered a shrug, and a smile, and a, "Draco."  
  
Malfoy shivered, a single, full-body shiver from head to toe, but only shook his head when Harry tried to pull up the blankets. Well, if he wanted to be cold, that was his business. Harry retreated with the tray.  
  
"Thank you, Harry," Malfoy whispered after him.  
  
Harry closed the door, and waited to scowl until he had. _Damn it. There go my plans for the next few days. I have to find out what happened when he either can't or won't tell me, make sure Malfoy's safe, and avoid letting him charm me in the meantime. It would be stupid, and it would all end in tears, given that the spell exists._  
  
All the same, it was rather nice to hear Malfoy speak his first name without malice, hatred, or the conviction that he was a blot on the face of the earth. But it was false, everything between them right now was, except Harry's willingness to help and Malfoy's insistence on knowing who he was.  
  
Harry sighed and went to put the tray in the sink.


	3. Arguments in the Garden

"You must be someone important, to be protected by such powerful wards."

Harry glanced up. He'd spent some time working in the garden, while Malfoy rested on what Harry had Transfigured into a comfortable chair from its ordinary form as a white bench. Harry had thought he was still asleep. Even if he hadn't been very deeply wounded, Malfoy was still in shock. He could doze in the sunlight for the rest of the afternoon, and Harry would make dinner for them both. It was a good plan.

Malfoy being Malfoy, of course, he had woken up early and lay there with his hands pillowed on his stomach, watching Harry with sleepy eyes that still shone. Harry reminded himself not to let his guard down. Malfoy might think he wanted the answers to his questions, but he would be more humiliated in the end, knowing that his worst enemy still alive had seen him so weak.

"Coward, remember?" Harry answered lightly. "I have the wards because of my cowardice, because I don't want to face up to the perils of the world." He stood up and rubbed his hands together so that the dirt could fall back into the flowerbeds, keeping a careful eye on Malfoy all the while.

Malfoy snorted lightly. "You don't act like a coward."

"What do you mean?" Harry checked the angle of the sun and floated out the next dose of the simple potion for healing pain and fatigue that had been the first one he learned how to brew. Malfoy accepted the cup and swallowed it without blinking. Well, if he did still brew, Harry thought, he was probably used to tasting worse concoctions than this.

"I mean that you don't act afraid as you move around the house," Malfoy said, cocking his head, eyes opening wider as he studied Harry. He had eyes of a very nice, pale grey. Harry noticed that, and then damned himself for noticing. "You trust in the wards more than someone with true cowardice would."

"I've had time to get used to them, and start thinking of myself as safe." Harry shrugged and floated the cup back to the kitchen sink, where it joined the tray from last night. He had decided that he was in the mood, after arguing with Malfoy, to sit in front of the fire and drink and relax instead of wash dishes. "That doesn't change the fact that I was a coward in the war."

He had practiced those lies in front of a mirror, and in front of Hermione's judging eye, until he was good at them, and could speak of them like any other tossed-off fact of existence. So he knew he hadn't blushed or stammered the way he used to when he lied, and Malfoy had no reason to drill him with a stare that seemed to be trying to get through his skull.

"Liar," Malfoy whispered, voice full of wonder. "Why do you persist in deceiving me, when you also claim that we never met before? And when I know that I know you, but not from where?"

Harry rolled his eyes. "If you keep accusing me of lying, then we aren't going to get along very well," he snapped, and brushed past Malfoy roughly to go inside and fetch him another blanket. Sunlight or not, Malfoy was shivering.

"I'm only telling the truth," Malfoy called from behind him, leaning forwards so far that Harry thought he would fall out of the chair when he looked back. "A habit you might consider taking up."

Harry shook his head firmly and brought the blanket back, wrapping Malfoy up until he stopped shaking. Malfoy smiled drowsily at him, apparently taking Harry's silence for the warning it was--that he didn't intend to talk any more right now--and pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders, shutting his eyes.

But he did murmur, before he went to sleep, "You might as well tell me. I'm going to find out in the end anyway."

Harry rolled his eyes again and turned his back, digging firmly in the soil until he had a hole of the proper depth to transplant the young sapling he'd decided to move. Behind him, Malfoy's soft snores made a gentle background to his work.

*

Harry crouched down in front of the shimmering, seared line where his wards touched the ground outside his home, largely invisible unless one was looking for it, and cast yet another detection spell. It glowed to life as a lightning bolt that spread out in several jagged directions, flickered with blue-green light for a second, and then vanished.

Harry sat back, closed his eyes, and swore in the several languages he'd started studying since he went into hiding. He only knew that his wards had been damaged by an attack the night Malfoy came in, that Malfoy had somehow come through them, and that the damage had been fully healed.

In other words, the same thing every single other detection spell had told him when he cast it.

He stood up and cast several new spells at the nearby gentle downs, every one of which came back negative. If Malfoy's enemies lurked and watched them, there was no sign of it. If they had left any visible trace on the landscape the night of the attack, there was no sign of it. If they had come near enough for Harry's tracking wards to catch a glimpse of them and retain an image, an idea Harry had borrowed from Muggle security cameras...

There's no sign of it.

Discouraged, Harry flung up the usual glamour that concealed his Apparition and then Apparated back inside the wards, rather than stepping through them. No use revealing to an unseen watcher who might not know he lived here that, yes, there was a house behind that hazy shimmer.

"Anything?"

Harry started. Malfoy was out of both bed and the chair, and stood leaning on the wall of the front garden, cocking his head at Harry as if he assumed that Harry had hurried back specifically to tell him the news.

"No," Harry said, and surveyed Malfoy. Yes, his face was less pale and his hands were curled gently on top of the wall, not gripping it for strength. Then Harry would be as forthright. "Who was chasing you?"

Malfoy lost his faint smile in seconds, and shook his head. "Some of it I don't remember," he said, "and the rest I can't tell you."

Harry snorted, hopped up on the wall, and then hopped down inside the garden again. "That's one kind of honesty," he said. "But if I don't have any idea who was chasing you, then that means I don't know what kind of weapons they have, and I have no idea if my wards can protect you, and I don't know how you got through them in the first place and whether someone else might exploit the vulnerability." He walked at a brisk pace towards the kitchen.

Malfoy kept up with him easily. "I can tell you this much," he said, as he stood in the doorframe watching Harry get lunch ready. "I was heading for a place of safety. And I know that my enemies didn't have any idea where it was."

Harry clenched his teeth and looked up at the ceiling. "So you said before," he muttered, when he could speak and take out his violence on the sandwiches he was putting together instead of Malfoy. "But you shouldn't have had any idea where my house was, either. So one of your enemies might still be able to follow you, if they happened to cast the same spell." He turned around and stared at Malfoy, while his hands followed the familiar steps of piling cheese on slices of tomatoes he'd grown himself and capping the whole thing with a slice of a ham he'd traded with a Muggle farmer for. "So. What was the spell you used to get in here?"

Malfoy's eyelids drooped, and he looked away. "I'll tell you if you tell me something," he said.

"Bargaining when it's your life on the line?" Harry hit the edge of the counter. "You have more reason to tell me, so I can help you, than I have to reveal anything."

Abruptly, Malfoy gave him a bright laugh and looked back around, his face shining when Harry sneaked a glance at him. "Never mind," Malfoy said. "I'll tell you, because you've answered my questions with the way you were acting. I was about to ask why you considered yourself a coward, but you're not. The way you went out this morning to inspect the wards when someone could have been hiding there, and the way you stand up to me. You're not. That was a lie, and now that I know it, I can proceed to discover what else you're hiding."

"You think you're formidable enough to prove me brave?" Harry mumbled, but he grimaced. Damn it, he'd forgotten to act his part around Malfoy. But Malfoy squirmed under his skin and bit him like a bug, always had.

"Harry," Malfoy said, his eyes glinting with the kind of humor that Harry couldn't help suspecting his Slytherin friends usually saw. "Stop lying. You're not very good at it-- not because you haven't practiced, I can tell you have, but because what you are shines through anyway, the way that a torch would if you tried to hide it under a basket."

"The torch would set the bloody basket on fire," Harry grumbled. "Keep that in mind, if you don't want to be surrounded by flames and screams."

Malfoy jerked straight, and stared at him. "Flames..." he whispered.

Fuck me, Harry thought, barely resisting the temptation to hit himself in the middle of the forehead with one hand. He's searching for clues already, and then I only have to go and give him one!

But the worst thing he could do right now was to confirm Malfoy's reaction by acting as if it was important, so instead he blinked at Malfoy, turned away, and said, "Do you want mustard on your sandwich?"

There was a long moment when he thought it might not work. Malfoy was breathing hard behind him, just the way he had when he flung his arms around Harry's waist and clung for dear life--

And isn't this a nice way to find out that that memory could be arousing? Harry thought, clenching his teeth as his blood stirred.

But the moment passed, and Malfoy said softly, "How we know each other has something to do with fire. I'll remember that."

Harry shrugged. "You never answered the question about the mustard," he said, and when Malfoy didn't respond, turned around and looked at him. "Come on, Malfoy."

"I told you to call me Draco." Malfoy had gone back to lounging against the counter, his head bent as if he found the black-and-white checkerboard pattern of the kitchen floor fascinating, but he jerked up now and turned around to face Harry, his eyes as intense as the centers of diamonds.

Harry raised his hands. "Fine, Draco," he said. The more he thought about that, the more he thought it might be a good thing. It wasn't a name he had ever called Malfoy before, so the echoes of his voice pronouncing it would raise no memories. "But you need to tell me before I just dump all the mustard I can find on your sandwich, and follow it with garlic."

Malfoy blinked and stared. "Well," he said at last, sounding a little breathless, "wherever I know you from, it's not a restaurant. No one in the places I patronize would use condiments that unrefined."

"You just say that because you haven't tried the garlic soup I make," Harry said, deciding at the last second that mentioning Mrs. Weasley's name probably wasn't a good idea. "Anyway. Well?"

Malfoy regarded him for a few moments with the smile lingering around his mouth in a way that looked painful, then shrugged. "A little bit of mustard is fine."

Harry soberly tended to these instructions, and then handed over the sandwich. He wondered what Malfoy would say if he knew that he was eating food mostly grown and raised by Muggle methods, but saw no need to torture him with it. So Harry walked over to the kitchen table, and pulled out Malfoy's chair on the way. He didn't need to take the invitation and sit to eat with Harry, but he could if he wanted to.

Malfoy let out a little moan as he sat down and took the first bite. Harry shot a quick glance at him, and decided that he could have lived without hearing that sound, just as he could have without remembering the way Malfoy had clung on to him as they swooped above the burning Room of Requirement.

"This is extraordinarily good," Malfoy said, and then paused to lick a bit of juice that was trailing down his chin. He looked so different from how Harry had ever seen him look that he had to smile. Malfoy looked up, blinked, and then returned the smile with one of his own. "Perhaps I was wrong about meeting you in a restaurant after all."

Harry let his smile fade as he bit into his own sandwich, expertly keeping the tomato from dripping all over his face by the positioning of his fingers. "Will you give it a rest, Mal--Draco? I've helped you and done a few things that you asked. There's no need for you to figure out exactly who I am. You probably wouldn't like me if you knew the real me, anyway." There. He had never thought Malfoy the sort to refuse a warning like that. If anything, he would probably think someone who talked like that and didn't have a lot of money was vulgar.

"What about you is so objectionable?" Malfoy leaned back and propped one of his feet on Harry's lap. Harry pointedly moved to the side so that his foot crashed to the floor. Malfoy smiled as if the movement had told him something, but didn't try again. "As you said, you've helped me and done some of what I asked. Not as helpful as a house-elf, but they aren't good company, anyway."

"Neither am I," Harry said, and turned his hand over to show some of the dirt ingrained in the lines.

Malfoy looked at his palm as if he didn't know what he was supposed to be seeing, and then raised an eyebrow.

"I work," Harry said, tapping his fingers sharply on the table in front of Malfoy, so that the git jumped. "With my hands. And live behind wards, and don't have a lot of money, and don't associate with the sort of people you probably spend most of your life around." Not from their lack of trying, though. At the height of the madness, with hundreds of owls coming to Harry's house every day, it seemed he had received at least ten invitations to pure-blood parties every week, and many more proposals of alliance, financial backing, and loveless marriage than that. Apparently the parties were more exclusive. "Not exactly good company material."

"Someone who's shallow might think so," Malfoy said, and his eyes flashed. "I'm far from that." He splayed one hand out on the table as though he was going to invite Harry to wrestle with him. "Far from that," he repeated, eyes so bright that Harry could feel them burning.

Well, that's too bad, isn't it? Because I don't want him here, and he wouldn't want to be here either if he had the slightest memory of who I was. Harry leaned forwards until his face was a few centimeters away from Malfoy's. Malfoy coiled slightly back in his chair, raising his hands a single centimeter of his own.

Battle-trained, Harry thought. He didn't learn that in the war. The Unspeakable theory was becoming more and more likely.

"What vulgar behavior do I have to show to convince you?" Harry whispered. "Spit in your face? Urinate on your clothes?"

Unaccountably, Malfoy relaxed, and the light in his eyes brightened. "These are your clothes," he pointed out, and plucked at the white shirt he wore, a bit too big for him in the chest but tight across the shoulders.

"You're so literal," Harry said, relaxing back in his seat, too, and shook his head. "Anyway. What about if we just agree not to penetrate into each other's mysteries? You don't want to tell me how you got here. I don't want you to ask questions about me. That's a clear enough bargain."

"But I like...penetration," Malfoy murmured, looking at the moment as if he would never do anything but lounge in the chair over the remains of his sandwich, hands resting lazily on his knees and a half-smile on his face.

Harry choked, and was glad that he'd had only air in his mouth. "Fine," he said. "Then you promised to tell me what spell you used to get through the wards. Well?"

Malfoy's face wiped itself free of the grin, and he looked solemn. Not that Harry trusted that, he told himself. Malfoy was capable of looking like that and still joking around, or lying. Harry thought he knew Malfoy better now than he ever had in school, but that only revealed him as more dangerous, because more adult.

"It was a spell that's supposed to take the caster to the safest nearby place," Malfoy said at last, after a complicated pause. "No matter where it is, no matter what kind of protections it has. No matter if he knows where it is or not."

Harry scowled. "Are you stupid or what?" he snapped. "I know what you're talking about, and it's dangerous, experimental magic. It mingles willpower magic, and that's not a field they’ve studied much yet, with a traditional incantation, and the only way you can do it is to fling yourself into thin air and hope--what are you grinning about?"

"A non-cowardly gardener who's an expert in defensive magic and up on current magical theory," Malfoy murmured, standing and sweeping Harry a little bow. "You do present an intriguing puzzle." He leaned nearer, and Harry found himself holding his breath.

"One I would like to get to know a little better," he whispered against Harry's ear, and then sauntered out of the room.

Harry stuffed the entire rest of the sandwich in his mouth, and sulked.


	4. Fame Between the Lines

  
Harry stood in the middle of his study, head bowed. Bookshelves on the walls or not, this was the sturdiest room in the house, and the easiest to raise protection spells in. Harry had decided that he wanted one defensive position inside the wards themselves. To mask it from enemies who could pierce through those wards, he chose, not glamour charms, but books. Most people would take a look into the room and conclude that Harry wouldn’t want to try and protect himself in a place loaded with books that could burst into flames or fall from the walls on top of his head or simply lose valuable data.  
  
Since the war, and especially the spell, Harry had found that simple deceptions were his best defense.  
  
He concentrated now, his magic rising through him in precise gradations. He had begun to steady meditation out of simple curiosity, and found that he had the same problems with it that he did with Occlumency: it was hard for him to clear his mind. But the discipline he had acquired that way was good for something else, and he was using it now.  
  
Every breath he took made his lungs expand a bit more. Every one he exhaled carried more magic with it. He could feel the vibrations of it through his hands. His wand had already leaped out of his grasp once. Now it lay on the library table in front of him until he was ready for it.  
  
And he nearly was. His fingers tingled as he slowly extended them, and brushed the edge of the wand.  
  
He thought the nonverbal spell for Apparition as hard as he could. If he was going to replicate the conditions in which Malfoy had come through the wards, then he probably couldn’t speak aloud; Malfoy wouldn’t have wanted his pursuers to know which spell he intended to cast next.  
  
The world around him shuddered weirdly, and Harry felt himself turn sideways. He grinned, even though it made his face feel like it was about to crack. He rose into the air and the blackness of Apparition crowded around his vision—  
  
And vanished, to leave him in the same place. Because, of course, the safest place he could be right now was here, in the heart of his fortress.  
  
Harry laughed aloud and whirled around, clenching his fists above his head as he danced. It had worked, it had worked, it had _worked!_ He had gathered his magic until he could will himself through the wards on sheer stubbornness alone, and that meant that he knew how Draco could get in, and _that_ meant that he could patch the hole that had allowed it and make sure no one else could use the same route. His home was safe once again.  
  
Of course, it wasn’t an _exact_ replication, because Draco had performed the spell under extreme duress, without the time (or at least so Harry assumed) to gather his will and power that Harry had had. And that increased Harry’s admiration for his skill and his talent for survival. But it was pretty close.  
  
“Are you always this given to mad private rituals?”  
  
Harry checked his little dance, flushing, when he saw Draco at the door of the library, but he couldn’t help grinning at him. “Sorry,” he said. “Did I wake you up?”  
  
“I’m perfectly capable of moving around, you know,” Draco said. “I’m well.” He evidently thought Harry’s glance at his bandaged arms wasn’t worth answering. “And I want to know what happened.” He moved in, staring curiously around the room and then at the table in front of Harry, where he seemed to expect ritual paraphernalia. When he didn’t see any, he rested his hip on the table and raised his eyebrows at Harry.  
  
“I was discovering how your _stupid_ spell,” Harry said, thinking he should stress just how stupid it was so Draco would know in case he ever wanted to try it again, “could get through the wards. I cast the same spell, with the same desire, but probably not the same amount of will.” He smiled at Draco. “To be able to call it up like that, all at once, and _want_ with an undivided mind, without tiny little thoughts plaguing you…it’s amazing.”  
  
Draco stared at him some more. Harry let his smile fade, and cocked his head. “Did I make a mistake?” he asked. “Did you do something different?” He grimaced a little at the thought of doing the spell again, when the first time had already been an intense effort, but of course he would if this wasn’t the way Draco had done it. Better exhausting himself a few times in a row, in safety, then remaining unsafe.  
  
“ _You’re_ amazing,” Draco said, voice low and rough. “To reason backwards from a casual mention of the magical theory, to try it, to succeed, and then to praise _me_ …” He lowered his head. Harry thought he was bracing defensively, and nearly responded with a Shield Charm, but stopped himself in time. There was also the possibility that that particular spell might trigger memories in Draco.  
  
Then Draco—Malfoy, he was that now, the minute that Harry emerged from the haze of success that the spell had cast him into—stepped forwards, and Harry finally recognized the expression on his face. Draco wasn’t going into a rage, wasn’t trying to protect his secrets. He looked like he wanted to get his hands on Harry, sure, but for a whole different reason.  
  
Harry aimed his wand at him anyway, but only for a swift jab in the middle of Draco’s chest. “Back. _Off_.” He emphasized each word, the way he had each syllable of his name the other night.  
  
Draco just watched him, and said at last, “You make me hungry. You make me hungry like no one else I’ve ever met.” He didn’t back off.  
  
Harry rolled his eyes, a little more easy with this now that the first shock had passed, and decided that a free warning was in order. “You were just wounded,” he said. “Think about that. Think about the shock and the adrenaline you passed through, the intensity of your experiences, what you must have felt when you woke to find yourself in a place of safety.”  
  
Draco still didn’t move, but his face underwent a rippling change, like several clouds piling together to form an image. “You’re saying,” he said at last, voice so odd that Harry frankly couldn’t tell which emotion was uppermost, “that I’m responding to you this way just because you’re my _Healer_?”  
  
Harry nodded, relieved that Draco had said it instead of Harry having to say it himself. “You phrased it elegantly,” he added, because more praise was probably safe now.  
  
“You’re _ridiculous_ ,” Draco said, and strode out of the room. He did have to stop and catch himself against the door, Harry noticed. He had staggered sideways. Harry cast a few Strengthening Charms unobtrusively in his general direction and sighed, glancing around the study.  
  
It did seem less important that he had achieved this triumph, now that Draco wasn’t here to share it. But Harry shuddered to imagine what Draco would feel if he broke through the spell and discovered that he had trusted all his secrets to his boyhood rival. Better a small betrayal now, the irritation Draco might feel that Harry had rejected his advances, than a greater betrayal later, one that might mark him for the rest of his life. Harry was doing his best to care for Draco’s future as well as his present, his mind as well as his body, although he knew Draco didn’t see it that way.  
  
 _Besides. If he’s that well, he can leave in a little while, and between us, we’ll figure out how to get him to the Ministry or wherever else he needs to go without alerting his enemies._  
  
*  
  
“I’m going to Hogsmeade,” Harry called into Draco’s bedroom, where he knew Draco had spent the past hours sulking. “Is there anything you need?”  
  
No response. Harry shook his head. Either Draco was asleep, probably the best thing for him right now, or he had decided Harry wasn’t worth talking to. Which would sting a little, but was the best in the end for both of them.  
  
Harry stepped into his front garden and shut the door gently behind him, hoping Draco would go to sleep if he wasn’t now.  
  
And then his wards rocked again.  
  
Harry at once dropped the satchel that he’d taken to carry the things he intended to buy, cast it against the house where it would be out of the way, and stretched out a hand. The small pool in the center of the garden rippled and arose into a shining sheet of water, one that displayed a flat surface for Harry’s eyes.  
  
“Show me,” Harry half-growled, and leaned forwards. This was one of his camera-like defenses that he hadn’t had time to use the day Draco showed up on his doorstep. But he was here now, and he was in time, and it was going to show him his attackers, oh yes.  
  
The water filmed over like a mirror, and showed him two cloaked figures, a man and a woman, both in dark blue robes with an abstract silver design over their hearts that Harry didn’t recognize at all. They had their hoods pulled back so Harry could see their faces, but those weren’t familiar to him, either. They pointed their wands at the wards—they stood in the place he had investigated the other morning, the one where they had first attacked—and spoke an unfamiliar spell as one. Once again, the wards rocked, and Harry braced himself against the physical shock without taking his eyes off the mirror.  
  
The clever, clever _bastards._ The second shock had come from within the wards themselves. No wonder Harry hadn’t found a spell that would tell him whether they had weakened his defenses; they had woven the vulnerability into the wards, like planting a bomb in a wall, and trusted Harry’s even more powerful magic to cover the traces of their interference.  
  
Harry narrowed his eyes and nodded. All right. He understood how they were fighting, now, and while he might not know who they were, where they came from, or everything they could do, the simple beginnings of the fact increased his confidence immeasurably.  
  
He was going to _do_ this.  
  
He stepped forwards, whirling around on one foot, and Apparated with the nonverbal spell, appearing behind the attackers. They were good, and one of them turned around at once, the woman, with dark red hair and dark eyes that reflected tranquil power. She didn’t care that she was breaking into someone’s home.  
  
 _Fuck reasonable, then,_ Harry thought, and gave up any thought of persuading them to leave. Instead, he launched a fire spell that landed like a burning star on the woman’s right leg. She paused to swat at it, no doubt thinking it was a spark, and no more than that.  
  
Because her hand was touching the spark at the moment it blew up, both her hand and her leg went numb. The leg collapsed beneath her, and the woman went down hard enough to hit her head against the dirt, her expression still incredulous when Harry Disarmed and Stupefied her.  
  
Harry then turned to face the man—  
  
Who wasn’t there.  
  
Auror training or battle experience or common sense, it could have been any of them that saved his life right then, but Harry wasn’t complaining, especially not when they did it. He leaped forwards, sprawling on the dirt and kicking left at the same time. The spell that was carefully aimed right where he _had_ been standing splintered past him more than anything else, throwing up dirt when it landed.  
  
The man’s brown eyes flashed as he spat yet another spell Harry didn’t recognize. Harry raised a Shield Charm shaped like a ramp in front of himself, and the spell skidded off it and bounced back at the man as if off a mirror. He barely got out of the way in time.  
  
Harry locked his heels beneath him for a moment, counted to three, and then kicked himself off and up and around, coming around in a wild, flailing spin that meant the man’s next two curses failed to strike him as well. Then Harry murmured, “ _Catenis_ ,” and they came to life around the man, enormous chains that lost all their slack in an instant when Harry gestured. The man flew to the ground in much the same way as the woman had, his wand flying free before Harry’s _Expelliarmus_ clipped it and carried to him.  
  
Harry, breathing hard, checked the man’s hands for other weapons and then spent a moment “listening” to both of them. That was the only way he knew how to describe it, the extension of his concentration and his senses beyond his body so he could pick up on things that were there but which he rarely paid attention to. It was the best method of finding out how powerful their magic was; everyone, he had discovered, had magic that could sing, and the power of the tone would tell him about the power of the spells.  
  
The man and woman were both, to his surprise, only moderately powerful, their tones sounding in his ears like someone running a finger around the top of a glass. It must be their training that had made them dangerous, instead of inherent strength. Harry had nothing to fear from them, he thought, as long as he kept them away from their wands. They lacked the raw power that would let them use wandless magic.  
  
So he spent a few moments figuring out what they had done to his wards and pulling out the near-invisible weave that was meant to crack them down the middle, and then some more repairing the damage they had caused with this latest series of blows.  
  
Then he grimly rounded up his captives, cast the spells that would blind and deafen them for the length of their stay so that they would have no idea how to get into his home, and dragged them back inside the wards.  
  
Draco had some _explaining_ to do.  
  
*  
  
“ _Talk_.”  
  
It was gratifying, Harry had to admit to himself, despite everything, to see the expression on Draco Malfoy’s face when Harry slung the two enemy wizards down in the door of his bedroom and then leaned against the frame with his arms crossed. By then, Harry wasn’t even winded. The battle had been intense, but shorter than many of those he’d fought in.  
  
Draco stared for long moments, as though he had never seen those blue robes and their strange silver symbol before. Harry was about to tear off the patch of cloth that held the symbol and show it to him when Draco moved from the bed, coming over to crouch above the woman’s body. He let his fingers trail above her left arm, not touching, and Harry found himself holding his breath and waiting for a hidden Dark Mark to appear.  
  
Then Draco spat into her face.  
  
Blinded and deafened or not, there was nothing wrong with her sense of touch; she flinched violently backwards, slamming her head into the floor on the way. Draco gazed grimly down at her, and something like humor touched the edge of his mouth before he drew back and stared at Harry.  
  
“I never saw these particular people before in my life,” he said. “But that may be the memory loss, I don’t know.”  
  
“But you know the organization they work for,” Harry said, who had heard the omission in his words and wasn’t in the mood to let it pass unmentioned.  
  
Draco tipped his head to the side, eyes so wide and wary that Harry grimaced. “I’m not trying to hurt you,” he said, taking a step back and standing so that Draco could shut the door on him if he wanted. “But this has become less about how much you trust me and more about how I’m going to keep you alive. So. What information _can_ you share with me, because it will be helpful but not damage you?”  
  
Draco was silent for a few minutes more. Harry waited, telling his thrumming blood that it could bloody well _wait._ He’d calm down, or later he would go and brew a really vigorous potion or something. Either way, it wasn’t going to have violent action right now.  
  
“You’re being awfully patient about this,” Draco whispered at last.  
  
“I can think of a few reasons that you wouldn’t have told me already,” Harry said. “It makes me patient, to know that you might _actually_ have a good reason. But the game’s changed, now.” He nodded at the people on the floor. “Either someone else might have seen the fight—it’s what I’d do, leave a spy out of the battle to see what happened, maybe a trainee—or they’re going to realize that two of their minions are missing soon. What?” he added, since Draco’s lips had twitched.  
  
“Minions,” Draco echoed. “You _do_ talk like a Gryffindor.”  
  
Harry shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what you call them. Unless it does, and this is something you can share with me.”  
  
Draco licked his lips some more. Then he said, “There is—some truth to the guesses you’ve made.” Which was as good as saying that he was either an Unspeakable or worked in some other capacity for the Department of Mysteries, Harry reckoned. “But I can’t let a gesture of trust like that out without some guarantee of return.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “Say what you mean, without all the fancy dancing around the subject.”  
  
“I want to know who you are,” Draco said. “Where you trained. Whether you’re the kind of person who can be trusted with the truth of who these people are and what they want. Because, believe me, in this case, truth is nearly as dangerous as ignorance.”  
  
Harry stared at him. Draco stared back, and while it was the same kind of hunger he had shown earlier that blazed behind his eyes, there was more grim determination in the way he looked than Harry had wanted to acknowledge.  
  
All Harry could think was, _Bloody. Fucking. Impasse._


	5. A Bloody Stubborn Argument

  
“Come, Harry. Surely it shouldn’t be _that_ hard to stop lying. I know that you can speak truthfully to me about things like mustard and sandwiches. You still have a grip on honesty.”  
  
Draco’s voice insinuated itself around Harry’s thoughts, and he scowled at him, shaking his head. He _needed_ to know who these people were in order to keep Draco safe, and himself, he reasoned out. But there might be other places he could find out the information, especially if Draco really did work for the Department of Mysteries as he suspected. Meanwhile, he would never get the safety of his home back if he told Draco the truth, even once.  
  
“Mustard and sandwiches,” he said, again slowing his voice down so that Malfoy might have a chance of understanding and _comprehending_ his objections, “are small things. This is something larger, something more important.”  
  
“I don’t know that it’s necessarily more important,” Draco said seriously, tilting his head to the side and seeming to consider the problem. “After all, have you ever had too much mustard on a sandwich? It runs _everywhere_ and stains your robes. Not the sort of thing you want to happen before a lunch with the Minister.”  
  
Harry filed those words in his memory—they were yet more proof that Malfoy had been someone important in the Ministry before this—and said, “This is important in a different way. This time, _blood_ might stain our robes.” Draco only smiled at him, and Harry snarled and finally blurted out what had been bothering him from the first time that he realized Draco seemed to care more about figuring out Harry’s lies than what his enemies were doing next. “Doesn’t it _matter_ to you? You’re happy here, you act as though you’re on holiday! Why?”  
  
“I trust the spell,” Draco said simply. “I know it would bring me to a place of absolute safety, that it wouldn’t betray me no matter what happened.” He leaned forwards and reached out as though he would brush a hand down Harry’s arm, but Harry glared at him and he stopped. His voice was small as he whispered, “And I trust you.”  
  
“Despite the lying,” Harry said, not managing to make it a question, when it felt as though endless beats of silence had passed.  
  
“Despite the lying,” Draco said. “This is going to sound ridiculous, but I _am_ familiar with what basic honesty in someone looks like, even if I’ll never attain it myself.” His smile was sharp and pointed, but Harry could sense the serious purpose behind it and refrained from smiling back. “I know what you have. I know what you can give me: protection.”  
  
“Yes,” Harry said, when he had waited a minute to see if any more words would be forthcoming. “Not truth.”  
  
“But that’s unnatural for you,” Draco said, leaning forwards as though he had forgotten all about the bodies on the floor. Harry hadn’t, and moved slowly away, casting another Stunner at the man as he stirred. “Unusual. I can tell. Why do you trust other people, despite the wards, and not me? What did I _do_ to you that was so awful, when I can’t remember your face?” He paused, and for a moment shivered, as if he stood in the shadow of a cloud. “Or was it something my father did?”  
  
Harry smiled. Hermione had told him to take advantage of the stories people would make up for themselves after he cast the spell, and here was an example. He nodded. “Exactly. I don’t expect you to answer for his crimes, or make up for them. But I can’t forget it, either. So I have enough reason for disliking you, and I think I’ve done enough just by taking _his_ son in and nurturing him. I don’t want anything more from you than the truth. Is that so hard, when you’re insisting on it from me?”  
  
Draco stood still, his arms folded across his chest as if he was cold, his body poised, apparently on the edge of leaping off a cliff. Then he said, “No, that’s not it.”  
  
Harry wanted to throw up his hands and storm away. What, Draco wouldn’t believe the truth when he heard it? It was true that Harry still disliked Lucius for what he had done to Ginny, even if he didn’t hate him after the end of the war, and would prefer to have as little to do with him as possible.  
  
“It _is_ ,” he said. “I don’t know what else to tell you if you don’t believe that someone can hate the parent and yet still be courteous to the son. But that’s all I’ll ever be to you, courteous.”  
  
“You’ve joked with me,” Draco said. “You’ve done things you didn’t have to do, like bringing me a second blanket when I was cold, instead of just casting a Warming Charm.”  
  
“I have _too_ cast Warming Charms—”  
  
“Only when you were doing something else to help me at the same time,” Draco said, and smiled at him. “But otherwise, you do what’s more personal, because you sensed—how, I don’t know—that that would help me recover faster than the totally impersonal charms.” He moved closer to Harry and lowered his voice. “I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know how you sense what I need and offer it at exactly the right time. But whatever is behind the emotions you feel for me, it’s not hatred. For my father or otherwise.”  
  
Harry let his nostrils flare at the same time as he ground his teeth. “Fine. Let’s say that I _strongly dislike_ your father. Now. If you aren’t going to tell me anything, then I think I should take these people and find someone who will.” He flicked his wand, and more bonds appeared around the wrists and ankles of both the man and the woman. If he was going to transport them, then he wanted to be sure they were secure on the way.  
  
“Wait!” Draco took a single stride forwards and then stopped when Harry pointed his wand at him. Harry relaxed a second later, snapping the wand up and looking away, his heart and his blood both beating in his cheeks. It was a stupid, battle-oriented reflex, but there you were. His caution from his Auror training, the war, and the paranoid years when he had to check that someone was hiding under his bed before he slept in it still hadn’t gone away.  
  
“Wait,” Draco repeated, more quietly. His eyes were on Harry, and there was a yearning in them that Harry didn’t understand. He hesitated, then said, more slowly, “I think that you might get in trouble if you left with them right now. As long as they’re inside your wards, those robes they wear won’t tell anyone else where they are. The magic you wield is too powerful.” He tried to make even _that_ into some sort of bloody compliment, catching Harry’s eye and smiling at him, but Harry scowled back, and he gave up. “If you step outside again, then they’ll start advertising their location.”  
  
“All right,” Harry said, and folded his arms, and rocked in place on his heels for a moment. “You have one minute.”  
  
Draco blinked at him.  
  
“One minute to explain what that means and why you didn’t tell me before,” Harry said, with patience that he thought remarkable to have endured all of Draco’s silly pretenses. “Or I Stun you and take you _with_ them, to be dumped off in some place where you can’t bloody bother me anymore!”  
  
Draco looked him in the eye, and then shook his head slightly and said, “Someone who cares about people the way you do wouldn’t do that.”  
  
Harry leaned forwards until he was a centimeter shy of having to catch himself on something or collapsing, and aimed his wand between Draco’s eyes. “Come any closer,” he whispered, “and I’ll show you what I can do. Or did you think that someone who protects his home the way I do is going to be useless?”  
  
Amazingly, in the face of everything, and because he apparently lived to exasperate Harry even when he didn’t know who Harry was, Draco smiled. “That gives the final lie to the idea that you’re a coward and didn’t participate in the war,” he said, clucking his tongue at Harry and slowly shaking his head, so that his cheek brushed Harry’s wand. “You never should have told that one, you know. You betray it with every breath you take.”  
  
Harry wondered how many people over the years had had detailed fantasies of murdering Draco and dumping his body in the Hogwarts lake. “Get. To. The. Point,” he said.   
  
Draco paused a moment as though hoping that Harry would join in his teasing, and then sighed when Harry didn’t. “If that’s the way you want to play it,” he murmured, with the air of someone denied a favorite treat.  
  
“This has nothing to do with how I want to _play_ it.” Harry folded his arms and wished for a moment that he hadn’t been as nice to Draco as he had. If he had been sterner, more threatening, mean, then Draco might have realized that he couldn’t jerk Harry around this way. “Tell me what the fuck is going on.”  
  
Draco nodded—apparently Harry had finally managed to pass whatever test of seriousness Draco had set in his own mind—and said, “All right. These people belong to a group that opposes the group I belong to.”  
  
Harry toyed for a moment with the notion of not saying anything, and then decided, _The hell with it._ Draco was already acting as though he didn’t intend to tell Harry any more than the bare minimum, so Harry had nothing to lose by talking about it. “The Unspeakables?”  
  
Draco fell back a step and lifted a hand in the same instinctive defensive gesture that Harry had seen the other day. “The fuck—how did you _know_ that?” he demanded, staring into Harry’s eyes as though he assumed they would suddenly change color or otherwise reveal Harry as someone new, someone dangerous.  
  
Harry gave him a nasty smile and no other response. Draco’s shock had tricked him into speaking the truth. Good. Harry waited, his fingers tapping gently back and forth on his arm, and giving Draco an expectant look.  
  
Draco finally seemed to realize what he was waiting for, because for the first time since he’d come to Harry’s house, Harry heard the sound of his teeth grinding. “Fine,” he said at last. “Never mind how you know that.”  
  
Harry just nodded. Now Draco was finally acting like someone sane, someone who realized they had more important things to talk about than the flirtations he seemed intent on conducting.   
  
“These people oppose Unspeakables who are sent out on delicate missions to bring back Dark artifacts,” Draco said, beginning to pace around the bed. Harry caught himself admiring the flow of muscles in Draco’s back and the way his legs moved, and told himself to stop it. “Most of the time, they’re people who the Ministry has taken artifacts from in the past, who don’t want to lose any more. At other times, they’re independent…” Draco sought a word from the many that seemed to float in ashes in his mind, and then shrugged helplessly. “Researchers who want the artifacts available so they can work on them.”  
  
“So you’re thieves,” Harry said, and couldn’t suppress his grin. Every time he found out something to the detriment of the Ministry that had failed to protect him, he did that.  
  
Draco swung around and glared, then shook his head. “Do you really _want_ those artifacts free and drifting around the wizarding world? You have no idea what they can do, what harm they could cause if this group acted in enough concert. So far, they’ve mostly banded together to stop what, yes, they do see as thefts, but someday, they might decide that it’s worthwhile to wield the artifacts as weapons against us. Some of those objects are _meant_ to work together, to cause widespread destruction, and the only thing that stops it are the jealousies of their owners. Better that we should gather them and prevent them from seeing the light of day ever again.”  
  
“Why not destroy them?” Harry asked. He was sure Draco would have an answer for that, since it wasn’t like no Unspeakable would have thought of that option before, but he wanted to hear it.  
  
Draco sighed. “Some of them resist destruction. Others are potentially useful, as long as you’re using their good traits and not the bad ones. Those, the Ministry wants us to study until we locate the source of that strength, and we can recreate it in other artifacts. Then we can destroy the originals.”  
  
“And what about the ones that aren’t protected and aren’t useful?” Harry laughed aloud at the glare that Malfoy had given him. “I can’t believe that all of them fall into the first two categories you named.”  
  
Malfoy closed his eyes and bowed his head as if praying for patience. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “There are some things that even Unspeakables have to take on faith, you know.”  
  
Harry nodded. “I’m surprised that you’ve told me as much as you have.”  
  
Draco blinked at him, and Harry sighed at the look in his eyes. “If you think that you can _Obliviate_ me, you’re wrong.”  
  
Draco made a little gesture with his right hand, shaking his head. “You have no idea how dangerous it is for you to know this.”  
  
“Probably not,” Harry had to agree. “It really doesn’t sound any more dangerous than some of the things I knew during the war.”  
  
Draco’s stare sharpened. “Who were you?” he whispered.  
  
Harry decided that he could work with the verb tense in that sentence later, but for now, he simply sighed and shook his head mock-sadly. “At least you understand, now, why I might want to live here, now that I’m not as important as I was during the war,” he said.  
  
“Not—really,” Draco said, and then apparently abandoned the tact that had held him back so far. “The only reason that I told this to you at all is that you’ve helped me and you seem utterly uninterested in interacting with the outside world. Even then…there are some of my superiors who would have my head for as much as I’ve spoken about.”  
  
Harry paused, looking into his face. Then he shrugged. He had his private suspicions about how much Draco knew and how much he could really say, but he was willing to let them go for now. “What did you steal from them?”  
  
Draco’s eyes went storm-colored.  
  
Harry smiled sweetly at him. “Telling the truth is a virtue, or haven’t you heard the sermons of one Draco Malfoy on the subject?” he murmured. “Of course, perhaps I should say that Unspeakables believe it’s a virtue for _other people_ , since I haven’t seen much evidence to the contrary yet.”  
  
Draco turned his back and walked to the far side of the room. “If I left,” he told the wall, “I believe that no one else would hide outside your wards and come after you.”  
  
“They would stay unless they saw you leaving,” Harry pointed out. “And then they would pursue you again, and that would make you end up in the same situation as before. This time, I might not be there to rescue you. I’d prefer it if you didn’t tear out the bandages that I’ve put on you just as I got them settled in.”  
  
Draco turned around to stare at him, and then laughed, without much humor. “I’ve never met someone who irritates me like you do.” Then he paused. “At least, I don’t think I have,” he said, his voice musing in tone.  
  
“We have to get you back to the Ministry,” Harry said, not wanting to leave Draco too much time to think about where he might have met Harry before. “That’s where you were headed when they came after you, isn’t it? Don’t you want to get there with your stolen artifact or your news before your enemies do?”  
  
Draco sighed. “You don’t understand the subtleties of the situation,” he whispered.  
  
“No, wait, I think I do,” Harry said, cursing himself for not thinking of this before. Of course, he hadn’t realized that Draco was an Unspeakable in truth instead of simply idle speculation before, either. “You would have gone to the Ministry when you cast that spell if it was the safest place for you. Which it should have been.”  
  
Draco half-raised a hand, then let it drop. “There might be more than one reason for that. You said yourself that the magical theory was untested. Perhaps it took me to the safest place it could find, the _nearest_ one. It might be no more than that.”  
  
“The safest place for you _should_ have been the bloody cellars you people work in,” Harry said evenly. “Why wasn’t it?”  
  
“I’ve told you enough,” Draco said. “I want the payment I asked for in the first place. Tell me something about you, now.”  
  
Harry smiled at him, said nothing, and floated the bound man and woman out of the room, pausing for a moment to Stun the man as he stirred back towards consciousness again. He didn’t shut the door of Draco’s bedroom, and heard the other man’s feet behind him as he escorted the prisoners towards his study.  
  
“Harry!”  
  
“I never agreed to give it to you,” Harry called over his shoulder. “You were the one who went ahead and gave me some of the truth in the _trust_ that I would. And trust is good for you, you know. Like truth!”  
  
Draco slammed his door. Harry chuckled, and went about setting up a secure warded environment for his two prisoners.  
  
He knew enough to construct some plans, now. He looked down at the abstract silver designs on the prisoners’ robes, considering.  
  
Then he smiled, and his smile went on widening the more he thought about it. It was a brilliant plan.  
  
And Draco would even get to help.


	6. Flirt-Battle

  
“Draco, can you tell me if this is right?”  
  
Harry was privately sure that it was right, but he didn’t want Draco to feel left out. He had spent enough time yesterday in his room with his door shut, sulking, the exact same way he had before Harry fought and beat their prisoners. Harry didn’t approve. Draco should be involved in his own escape, in the plan they would use to fool these enemies of his so that they could get him to safety.  
  
And _Harry_ was the ordinary person here, the one with the boring and normal life, the one who had the right to sulk when heroes and villains—whichever one Draco was—intruded on that life. Draco, as the Unspeakable with the glamorous career, should have been the one to take charge and show enthusiasm for danger.  
  
Since he wasn’t, Harry picked up the role.  
  
There was silence for a long time, and Harry began to wonder if he’d imagined the sounds of Draco going into the drawing room. At length, Draco sighed, in the way that Harry had when he was a first-year at Hogwarts assigned a long essay, and then stepped into the lab behind Harry.  
  
His voice altered in seconds. “What the _fuck_ are you doing?”  
  
 _Well, that caught his attention, at least._ Harry could feel the mad grin bubbling against the edges of his control, but he made sure that he turned around with an innocent face. “Well, you wouldn’t tell me what it was about them that made it so easy for their comrades to find them,” he explained, and swatted his fringe away. It kept hanging in his eyes. Keeping it long to hide the scar was all very well, but clearly something would have to be done about that. “But I decided it was probably the symbols on their robes. Right?”  
  
Draco just gave him a long stare, and then turned back to the spectacle in front of him, shaking his head.  
  
Harry had to admit that it _was_ something to see, especially if you came into the lab unprepared for it. The abstract silver symbols that he had cut from the prisoners’ robes hovered in the air above the table that Harry would normally use for brewing, thin lines of golden light connecting them to new robes that Harry had bought in Diagon Alley yesterday. The robes were plain black or dark blue cloth, good enough to pass in a pinch for the robes their enemies had been wearing.  
  
And while Harry hadn’t copied the symbols to those robes yet, that would be the next step.  
  
“You can’t just _separate_ those symbols from the robes,” Draco said, staring at the frayed cloth around the edges of the originals as if they would change and blur and reveal themselves still attached to the original robes. “There’s all sorts of spells that would alert them if something like that happened—”  
  
“Yes,” Harry said. “But those spells relied on being woven into the symbols the same way they’d woven a curse into my wards to collapse them at will. See it once, I know it. See it again, and I can duplicate that weaving and disarm it in a way that won’t alert them.”  
  
Draco turned and stared at him. Harry looked patiently back. There were inappropriate emotions in Draco’s eyes again, emotions that he would ultimately be sorry if he acted on, but not a lot of them, thank Merlin. Draco was remembering their argument of the other day, Harry thought, where he had given a lot and only got a little, and that would make him more cautious.  
  
“You make no sense,” Draco whispered. “You could be working somewhere as a highly-respected magical theorist. Why are you doing _this_?”  
  
“Who says that I _want_ to be a highly-respected magical theorist?” Harry had never learned how to cross his eyes on purpose, but he raised an eyebrow now and shook his head. “It’s only hard to understand if you assume that everyone is a Slytherin.”  
  
“What?” Draco blinked.  
  
“Ambitious,” Harry explained. “If you assume that no one _wants_ to be ordinary. I do. The war was enough for a lifetime.”  
  
Draco closed his eyes and stood there for a moment in silent thought. Harry had hopes that this would mark the end of his serious effort to find out who Harry was, because no matter what, he wouldn’t be happy with the result.  
  
And Harry didn’t _want_ to make Draco unhappy. In fact, he would be happier with a contented Draco than was quite good for either of them. But as the only one who knew and understood the truth of the whole situation, he had to be the one to make the decisions. Draco would thank him if he was in a comparable position.  
  
Draco opened his eyes, and then his mouth, but his question wasn’t about the way Harry had sensed the spells or about the symbols on the robes. Harry was still waiting for confirmation that these _were_ the way the Draco’s enemies tracked their agents, as a matter of fact, even though the heavy magic in them almost ensured they had to be. “Why would someone as good as you are, in all senses of the word, be allowed to retire by the wizarding world?”  
  
 _The most devastating question that you’ve asked yet,_ Harry thought, because how close the words came to the truth froze his vocal cords and he couldn’t immediately lie.  
  
Draco was watching his face, of course, and made a little noise of contentment. “I’m right, aren’t I? It wasn’t voluntary?”  
  
Harry relaxed and was able to speak again. If that was the tack Draco took, he could work with it. “Yes, that’s right. There were—things I wanted to do, but I wasn’t allowed to do them.” That was even true, if you counted “reform the Ministry” and “have some bloody privacy” on the list of things that the wizarding world wouldn’t allow Harry to do.   
  
“Then I don’t understand why you stay here,” Draco said. “Even with them keeping a watch on you, you manage to do quite complicated magic. You could do something about your exile if you wanted to.”  
  
His voice was charged, and thrummed, with eagerness. Harry smiled in spite of himself. “And you’re picturing yourself as, what? The knight who champions my honor to the wizarding world?”  
  
Draco blinked. Then he said, “Who knows? I’ve never been a knight before, though I’ve known a few.” His mouth twisted as if he was eating a lemon.  
  
They were already dancing on the edge, and the spell had held. Harry decided that he might as well go a little further, for his own amusement. “What, you mean the Boy-Who-Lived? Yes, I reckon he was, if what was reported of him in the newspapers was true.”  
  
Draco frowned fiercely, although in the way of someone who was fighting his own tendency, Harry noted with interest, to instantly say something, rather than someone who was going to give in to it. “I—suppose it was. To an _extent._ He was never as kind or compassionate as they claim. Not by a long shot. Not to Slytherins.” He was glaring at nothing now, his fingers curling so strongly into his palms that Harry was surprised he couldn’t hear tendons creaking.  
  
“Yes, that must have been hard,” Harry said.  
  
Draco looked at him once, and then asked abruptly, “Did you ever have trouble with him? Is that why they made you retire here? Because you crossed him?”  
  
 _Really,_ Harry thought in congratulations to the absent Hermione, who had told him this would happen sometimes, _you were right. I can come up with lies, but none of them are as good as the ones that people convince themselves of._ “Not exactly for the same reasons that you had, but yes, I had my trouble with that hero. That _legend._ ”  
  
Draco nodded. “I know that I knew you. I must have run into you sometimes before this. Where?”  
  
Harry laughed despite himself. “What, did you have a private club for everyone who hated him? A place that you could gather and toast his downfall? I promise, I never belonged to anything like that.”  
  
“What if I could help you get back what you lost?” Draco was whispering now, leaning forwards to lay his hand on Harry’s arm. “What if I could help you get your revenge?”  
  
“You know what _I_ think?” Harry whispered back, and leaned in himself.  
  
“What?” Draco’s eyes were wide and entranced.  
  
“That you should tell me whether these symbols are or are not the way they track each other, and if you know of any spells that prevent duplicating them,” Harry said in a normal tone of voice, and stood back up.  
  
Draco stared at him. Then he said in clipped tones, “It seems that you’re already familiar with the spells that cover them, if you’ve managed to separate them from their robes and not had hordes of enemies descend on us. What do you need me for?”  
  
There was an ache in his voice and a snuffed light behind his eyes. Harry gritted his teeth and wished he could explain without explaining, or better, that he didn’t notice such things.  
  
But Draco hadn’t accepted Harry’s warning that he would be better off simply not knowing, and Harry wouldn’t be the person he was, the person he had developed into and _liked_ being, if he could have ignored that Draco was hurt. So the best thing to do was live with it, for however long that took.  
  
“There could be something I’ve missed,” Harry explained, stepping back and peering at the symbols again. “You’re more familiar with your enemies than I am, even if I’m the one who’s more personally familiar with the spells.”  
  
Draco spent a moment seeming to think about that. Then he walked around Harry and studied the floating symbols, and turned to study the robes. When he spoke, his voice was subdued. “They won’t be fooled by glamours or Polyjuice, you know. Not for long. What are you going to do?”  
  
“I know,” Harry said. “But they’ve got to track the robes, and we’re going to copy the symbols, attach them to these robes, and then have some of my friends Apparate away with them. They’ll be hopping crazily around Britain, flashing signals from multiple directions all at once, and your enemies will have to check most of them out simply because any of them might be the real ones. It’s going to drive them _mental_.”  
  
For the first time since Harry had repulsed his latest advance, Draco smiled. “And what about getting me to safety?”  
  
 _He agrees that he’s well enough to leave, then. Good._ “Think about the safest place you can be,” Harry began.  
  
“This.” Draco turned and studied him with deeper and more melting eyes than he had used on the robes.  
  
Harry met his gaze patiently, and continued. “— _Other_ than this. We’ll get you there while these people are busy chasing the signals from the fake robes.”  
  
Draco delicately moved his tongue around his teeth. “They still might leave someone on watch here. We’ve never been able to tell exactly how big the group is, you know. It’s possible that they’ve banded together enough people to keep an eye on the place that I last disappeared and where they had last known contact with their agents.”  
  
Harry nodded. “That’s why we’re not going to travel by Apparition, or by stepping through the wards. We’re going to fly. How are you on a broom?” he added, as if he didn’t know. And really, he didn’t. It was possible that Draco hadn’t kept up with his Quidditch skills while he was busy being an Unspeakable.  
  
Draco turned and stared at him. Then he leaned forwards in the same deadly serious way he had when he thought Harry was going to confess. “I am _bloody fucking fantastic_ on a broom,” he said.  
  
Harry grinned. “Thought so.” He ignored Draco’s stare. “So. We’ll rise. The wards don’t have a hole at the top to let brooms through, but we’ll reach there, and you’ll hold onto me, and we’ll Apparate. Apparition points that are distant from your safe place at first, and then some flying, and then random Apparition, and then gradually drawing near your safehouse.”  
  
Draco let his eyelids fall over his eyes. “It might work,” he said. “But we’ll need two safe places.”  
  
“Why’s that?” Harry raised his eyebrows politely, wondering if Draco would suggest that Harry come with him.  
  
“I need a spot to hide the artifact I took from them.”  
  
Harry spent a long time staring at him and trying to fight the impulse to shut his eyes and beat his head against his hand. Draco would only take that as another clue to his identity, and Harry had had enough of his guessing for now.  
  
At last, Harry said, when he thought he had his balance back and wouldn’t shout, “So you’ve had it with you all this time? Something powerful and Dark, something that could have told them where my house is or signaled to them that _you_ were here? Or destroyed my house if it was used the right way?”  
  
“We’re the only two people here,” Draco pointed out, in an infuriatingly reasonable manner. “I wasn’t about to use it, not based on some of the things I’ve heard about it from my superiors. And you didn’t know it was here, so you _couldn’t_ use it.” He smiled.  
  
“You are beyond belief,” Harry said, shaking his head as his anger diminished. Of course Draco would do something like that. Of course he would. Well, he had told Harry now, and Harry was able to do something about it. That would have to be enough. “Fine. What kind of artifact is it? How dangerous? How safe to transport?”  
  
In answer, Draco reached down into his robes, into a pocket near his groin, and pulled out what Harry thought was a piece of metal at first. But he turned it over, and Harry saw the gleam of glass on silver. A mirror, the kind that you could easily hold up in front of your face as you brushed your hair.  
  
“It shows visions of other times and places,” Draco said softly, his eyes fastened on the mirror in a way that told Harry how severely the thing had tried Draco’s self-control. He might not do anything with the artifact until someone told him to, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t curious about what it could show him. “It’s easy to carry, and I don’t know if there’s anything out there that would damage it. Like so many of them.” He blinked and looked up at Harry.  
  
“You carry around your Dark artifact in a place where it might blow your cock up,” Harry said.  
  
“You’re too invested in explosions,” Draco said, rolling his eyes. “Not _all_ of them explode. Just the majority.”  
  
Harry was about to retort to that when Draco lowered his eyelids and murmured in a plainly sexual tone, “And also, it seems, more interested in the fate of my cock than you should be.”  
  
Harry touched his tongue to the inside of his mouth, counting time with taps, until he said, “Fine. But still. You _carry it around_?”  
  
Draoc snorted. “I hardly think someone like you needs to be worried about that, Harry. Wards of your strength would probably contain it before it could spread that far.”  
  
“But trap us in here with it,” Harry said. “And let me guess. The wards will keep them from sensing that it’s here—at least, for certain—as long as the mirror’s behind them, but the minute we venture out, the mirror will call to its owner.”  
  
“The owner has a tracking spell that I haven’t found a way to dislodge,” Draco said. “So, yes.”  
  
“Then putting it in a safe place won’t work,” Harry muttered, his brain racing. “They would just follow the signal to that place and recover it, and you would probably insist on not leaving it, anyway.”  
  
“The thought _had_ crossed my mind to retain what I fought so hard to take,” Draco said, modestly.  
  
“It’s always good to know about these little complications before we make complex plans,” Harry said, rolled his eyes at him, and turned around to consider the hovering symbols. With a few waves of his wand, he cast the sharp spells that would duplicate the symbols onto the robes. Draco gasped as he watched, but he turned back to Harry in concern as Harry put out a hand on the lab table to catch himself. Harry shook his head at him, especially when Draco started forwards and put a hand on his shoulder.  
  
“I’m fine,” he said. “The problem is that that spell took a lot of magical energy to cast, and if I have to figure out a way to duplicate the tracking spell on the mirror, then it’ll cost me more.”  
  
“Duplicate it so they’ll think that both it and their agents are running around the country?” Draco nodded. “That would work, if there was some way to copy the mirror. But dangerous Dark artifacts are also resistant to being copied.”  
  
Harry shut his eyes and waited until the shaking that invaded his limbs had passed for the moment, then snorted. “That’s because I’m not going to copy _the mirror_ ,” he said. “I’m going to copy _the spell,_ you magical-theory-deficient arse.”  
  
Draco was silent for a moment, and then said, “I didn’t know such things were possible. They probably aren’t, for anyone other than you.”  
  
Harry turned around quickly. There was a tone in Draco’s voice that made him wary. “I’m sure other people could do the same things, if they wanted to,” he said. “If they had the time and money to retire from the world and practice magical theory until the words were dripping out of their eyes when they went to sleep—”  
  
“It reminds me of someone else who does impossible things,” Draco went on meditatively. “Who did the things that no one else could do.”  
  
He paused. For a moment, the air between them rang like crystal. Harry waited, his heartbeat making him feel faint, his eyes locked on Draco’s.  
  
“But sod if I can recall who,” Draco said cheerfully, and turned away.  
  
Harry didn’t pick up a vial and throw it at the back of Draco’s head, but only because he really _was_ more mature than he had been. Instead, he flopped down in his chair and scowled.


	7. One Wild Ride

  
“Do you think it would be a good idea to come over when Malfoy’s there?”   
  
Harry had managed to catch George in the middle of baking something. Harry was fairly sure that it wasn’t an ordinary cake. He eyed Harry with some caution from the middle of the flour explosion that he had apparently just happened in his lab, and swatted absently at some of the white dust when it tried to drift into his eyes.  
  
“I need your help for the plan that’s going to involve taking these robes with the charmed symbols all over the place,” Harry explained. “So, yes, you have to come over.”  
  
George nibbled at his lip, and then drew his wand and Vanished the flour. “He might still figure out who you are.”  
  
Harry appreciated George’s discretion with not using his name. Draco seemed to have velvet feet or something, the way he kept creeping up on Harry when Harry wasn’t listening for him. He might come up behind them at any point when they were talking, and then he would overhear something he shouldn’t. Harry didn’t know why his ears wouldn’t work right around the git.  
  
Of course, the alternate theory was that Harry was simply so comfortable with Draco that he didn’t hear him coming because he didn’t listen for him the way he would for an enemy. But that was so disturbing that Harry preferred not to think about it if he didn’t have to.  
  
“I know,” Harry said. “But he knows—he figured out—that I fought on the Light side of the war. If he really questions it, we can tell him that I was part of the Order of the Phoenix and make him let it go that way.”  
  
George snorted lightly. “ _Make_ him?”  
  
Harry shook his head. “We understand each other, in a weird way. I know it sounds even stranger to say that aloud than it does to say that inside my head, but it’s true. We _do_. He knows that I would _Obliviate_ him in a second, and he would do the same thing to me, if he could.”  
  
“Because of who he is, and what you made him tell you?”  
  
Harry nodded. “It hasn’t diminished his curiosity to find out who I am, but he’s stopped that these last few days, as we refine the plan. I think he accepts now that he can’t trick or pressure me into telling him. If he really wants to know, he thinks now—or I think he thinks—that he’ll have to go back to the Unspeakables’ research offices and find out that way.”  
  
George sighed. “But even if he’s lost his memories, Harrykins, you haven’t.” Harry let the “Harrykins” go; George was allowed. “I don’t understand why you let him stay there in the first place, or why you trust him.”  
  
“You wouldn’t. You’re a Weasley.”  
  
 _Damn velvet-footed bastard._ Yes, Draco stood in the doorway behind him when Harry checked, and his arms were set in a stubborn position and his face in an ugly sneer. Harry shook his head and looked at George again. “Sorry about that. I’ll firecall you in the morning, all right? I want you to take some of the robes to Hogwarts and create your most spectacular efforts there.”  
  
George grinned evilly. “Fred would have approved,” he said, the highest words of praise he could give about anything, and then he made the fire go dark as he shut down the Floo connection on the other side. He usually did that, vanishing into whatever problem occupied him next without saying goodbye.  
  
Harry stood up and turned to face Draco. Draco’s arms didn’t relax even when he saw that Harry was now alone. This might prove to be a little harder than Harry had reckoned on.  
  
“The _Weasleys_ ,” Draco said. “Instead of opposing the Boy-Who-Lived, you look more and more like someone who might have courted him.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “Then you tell me who I am. Who was a Gryffindor, and fought in the war, and was close friends with the Boy-Who-Lived and the Weasleys? And if you call me Hermione Granger, then you can explain to the real one, when she shows up here this afternoon, why you made that guess.”  
  
Draco’s face cleared with something that Harry knew better than to hope was surrender. He clenched his hands into fists. “I should know,” he said, with passionate intensity. “What did you do to me, that I don’t?”  
  
“If I did something to you, when would I have done it?” Harry shook his head. “Even if you don’t remember who I am and should have, you would have remembered me if I’d met you since the war.”  
  
He only meant that Draco would have remembered any encounter with him because he had those Unspeakable-trained abilities of observation, but Draco’s face softened from the stern set it was in, and he looked Harry up and down. “Oh, _yes,_ I would have,” he said quietly.  
  
Harry had decided that the best thing to do when Draco flirted with him was to carry on doggedly, because doing anything else would only be bad for everybody. “And if it’s something to do with the wards, then you’ll remember when you leave.”  
  
“Unless you use a Memory Charm on me.” Draco gave him a bright smile and worked his hand towards his side as though he was checking on the position of his wand. Harry already knew where the slight bulge of Draco’s wand was, and it was nowhere near the place his pointing hand indicated. Sometimes training and paranoia paid off, especially when confronted with someone _else’s_ training and paranoia. “If you do that, then you and I are going to have words.”  
  
Harry knew he should perhaps take some warning from the way that Draco’s voice softened and deepened, but knowing what he knew, he didn’t need to. He just smiled slightly and held Draco’s eyes. “I know. And there will be no Memory Charm.”  
  
“You’re content to let me go, then?” Draco asked. “That’s it, that’s all, no attempt to find out anything more?”  
  
“I’ve got what I need from you,” Harry pointed out, and started to walk past Draco, towards the lab, where he had stored the robes with the symbols. “Now, let’s make absolutely sure that we have the brooms in the right places and the tracking spell on the mirror duplicated—”  
  
Draco slammed him into the wall. Harry was already turning as he went, as he fell, his mind reasoning out the direction he would need to go if Draco was trying for a throat strike, or for a stomach strike, or for—  
  
And then he realized that he was up against the wall, and Draco was hovering in front of him, not hurting him, not even touching him, but with his hands very present along the sides of Harry’s flanks and hips and shoulders nonetheless, so that Harry wouldn’t be able to ignore him. Harry stared at him, and narrowed his eyes. “Do you mind?”  
  
A faint smile illuminated Draco’s lips; a faint laugh spilled from his throat. “I really believe that you believe that, too,” he murmured. “That you’ll challenge me and not care. That you think you have some right to a trouble-free life.”  
  
“Where you’re concerned, I do,” Harry said, and tried to straighten up. Draco pinned him down with nothing but the shadows of his hands. Harry glared at him again. “I took you in when I could have put you beyond the wards for your enemies, healed your wounds, helped you. I’m helping you now. What more do I owe you beyond that?”  
  
“The rights inherent in the tension between us,” Draco murmured. “The fact that you keep telling me the truth and lying to me at the same time. The right of _this_.”  
  
And he kissed Harry, so light and fast and warm that trying to stop it would have been like trying to stop a hummingbird from brushing his cheek with its wing.  
  
Harry’s mouth opened in a gasp, and Draco followed up the advantage, his eyes shutting, his tongue spilling out of his mouth to lap its way into Harry’s, and Harry felt his heartbeat gave a single, giant, shimmering pulse, as if it was going to gong its way out of his body and into Draco’s.  
  
Draco was pinning him physically now, chest against chest, his hands on Harry’s hips and the gentle, suggestive thrust of his own hips becoming less gentle as the moments passed. Harry was so excited that he could hear a faint, thin singing in his ears. He wondered if he was about to swoon.  
  
He hoped not. That really _was_ the kind of thing that he would have to use a Memory Charm on Draco to get rid of.  
  
And then rationality caught up to the churning of his blood—well, rationality and the memory of what they would have to do that afternoon—and he caught Draco’s hands and forced him backwards, breaking the lock of their mouths.  
  
Draco stumbled a little, but didn’t say anything, not even in reproach. He looked at Harry instead, his mouth wet and swollen, his eyes bright and dazed, the way Harry imagined he might look after winning a Quidditch game.  
  
 _Not that he ever did that when I was playing against him._  
  
That was good, that was what he needed, a reminder of who they really were and how much Draco would hate him if he found out who he had kissed. Harry shook his head. “That’s no kind of right at all.” He was proud of how normally his voice came out.  
  
“I claim that it is,” Draco said, and then leaned in with a smirk that made Harry forget to object until those lips were right up next to his ear. That was when he whispered, “And you didn’t object until you began to convince yourself you should. You had to think about it first.”  
  
He winked and walked out of the room in the direction of the labs, his voice calling over his shoulder, “I think that we should take another look at the tracking spells on the mirror, don’t you?”  
  
Harry closed his eyes and pictured his peaceful, quiet garden, where he had worked before Draco came, and even in those first days after Draco came when he was still too wounded to spend a lot of time concentrating on the mystery of who Harry was. He pictured it until he could see the green of the trees and the colors of the flowers, until he could smell the rich odor of the disturbed earth.  
  
He would have that back again, he promised himself. That was the reality, the reality he was heading for, and the eruption of Draco into his life over the last few days was an—an _interruption._ He would have his real life back soon enough.  
  
A blast of magic from across the corridor made him open his eyes and run.  
  
And he was _not_ going to regret Draco’s leaving. Not at all. Not when the defensive spells in Harry’s lab had currently plastered him to the ceiling with shining spiderwebs, especially.  
  
*  
  
“Ready?” Harry asked, looking around the dining room at his friends.   
  
Ron, Hermione, George, and Ginny nodded. All of them held three of the robes with the fake symbols stitched on them as well as stones or other small objects that Harry had enchanted with copies of the mirror’s tracking spell. Draco had spent a lot of time staring at Ron when he showed up, and hadn’t even moved at first when Harry nudged him and tried to hand him a different kind of robe with protective charms woven into it. Harry had finally given up and simply dumped the robe on Draco’s head. When Draco had dug his way out from beneath it and stopped swearing revenge, then the rest of them had gone past the moment when they might have taunted him. Ron had a faint smile on his face, and Hermione was biting her lip to conceal her giggles, but they could work together now.  
  
“Ready, mate.” Ron reached out to tap Harry’s shoulder lightly with his fist. Harry could feel Draco’s gaze practically trying to light them both on fire in response, but he wasn’t sure if that came from Draco’s jealousy or from Draco trying to figure out why Ron Weasley would be close to Harry and Draco not know it. Harry didn’t care. Draco didn’t have a right to the first emotion, anyway.  
  
Harry received nods from the others—well, a nod from Hermione and George and a leer from Ginny, who had looked back and forth between him and Draco and obviously arrived at the conclusion that Harry would prefer she didn’t. Well, he could take Ginny’s teasing. If she wanted to tell him, again, how he needed someone to share his life here, she was welcome. It wouldn’t alter the way Harry did anything.  
  
“Then let’s _go_ ,” Harry said, and swung around, heading for the back garden, where he and Draco had left the brooms. Draco hurried after him, and Harry heard the soft _whoosh_ as Hermione and the others started Flooing to the outside points where they would begin the mad hunt.  
  
“You never did tell me what you would do with those two you captured,” Draco panted behind him, as they raced through the house and into the open air.  
  
“I have them under the Draught of Living Death,” Harry said, smothering his annoyance that Draco would choose to ask about that right _now_. It would be one of his last chances, anyway, since after today he would be gone, and leave Harry in his blessed peace. “I’ll eventually wake them up, when enough time has passed that I’m fairly sure the observers are gone from outside my wards, and take them to the Ministry. Then your lot can have them.”  
  
“There are compromised Unspeakables,” Draco said, vaulting onto his broom from a standing start, and winning Harry’s reluctant admiration. “Those who want the artifacts for themselves, those who might work with the owners.”  
  
“You can write to me,” Harry said. He probably couldn’t prevent Draco from owling him, anyway, and this would give him an excuse to confine his letters to official business. “Tell me who you think is trustworthy.”  
  
“How did you learn to make the Draught of Living Death?” Draco asked, as Harry began to whirl around on his broom and Draco followed him up.  
  
Harry answered absently, concentrating on the wards above his head, and how he would Apparate when he was a little short of them. He reached out a hand, and Draco held his arm under his touch. “What, you mean Professor Snape never told you that? It was part of the speech that he sneered at everyone on the first day of class, I thought.”  
  
Draco didn’t respond. Harry looked over and saw that he had his eyes closed in ferocious concentration, his head bowed.  
  
“You won’t figure out who I am that way,” Harry snapped. “Hold on, and keep stupid ideas out of your head. They won’t be able to keep up.” And he Apparated.  
  
*  
  
It was madness. It was pure, exhilarating skill. It was a feat that Harry had been longing to perform since he came up with this plan, and it was one that he never, ever wanted to do again.  
  
They appeared first above Hogwarts, and caught a wave from George; Harry had chosen to come with him because he wanted to give some initial credence to the idea that the enemy group’s agents and the mirror might be in the same place. And then he and Draco leaped, and leaped, and leaped, and leaped.  
  
Cornwall, with the waves leaping so vividly below them that Harry might have lingered if they were on a less tight schedule. Somewhere close to London, a peaceful meadow where Harry had come more than once to gather wildflowers and small animals’ dung and fur for Potions ingredients. The Orkneys, in the middle of a wind so wild that it nearly brought their journey to an end right there. The small mixed Muggle and wizarding village of Rosemary-on-Thyme, not far from the Weasleys’ house, where people came out of their sleepy houses and stared up. Harry smiled at them, and disappeared again.  
  
The whole time, they were flying.  
  
In hindsight, that would probably seem obvious to anyone Harry told the story to, but it was no mean trick to come out of Apparition and immediately bend over one’s broom, hurtling forwards a short distance, zigzagging and circling and falling and rising, and then Apparating again the moment Draco could get hold of his arm. Earth and sky waltzed around them. Wind stung tears from their eyes and tried to blow their lungs out. Storms appeared, disappeared, and alternated with clouds and blue sky and sky so grey that Harry was glad when they were allowed to vanish somewhere else.  
  
The whole time, Draco kept breakneck pace with him, and when Harry glanced over and met his eyes, he saw the gleam of challenge in them.  
  
The same gleam he used to see on the Quidditch field. The same one that Draco had shown him the whole time he was in Harry’s house, trying to figure out who Harry was.  
  
The regret Harry had said he wasn’t going to feel clogged his throat, and he cleared it and glanced away as they got ready to Apparate to the next destination.  
  
 _I wish he wasn’t under the spell. I wish I didn’t have to do that to him. Someone who can challenge me like that…_  
  
But once again, Harry shook his head and reminded himself that it couldn’t be different, could it? Of course not. Because if Draco wasn’t under the spell, then he would hate Harry, and then he wouldn’t challenge Harry in the same way; he would snub him and turn away in silence and probably not tell Harry as much as he had.  
  
He wouldn’t kiss him. He wouldn’t fly beside him.  
  
 _Instead of wishing the spell didn’t exist, I might as well wish for the whole of history to be different._  
  
They were drawing nearer and nearer the safehouse that Draco had chosen, one of the concealed Black properties, or so he had assured Harry when he was helping to plan the route. For the last jump, though, Draco had insisted on being the one to Apparate them. Harry reckoned that was only sense. Draco knew so few of Harry’s secrets, not even, really, where his house stood. He would be reluctant to surrender the Apparition coordinates of the place he was going to hide.  
  
And in another way, it was only good sense. That way, Harry couldn’t be tempted to visit Draco later, because he wouldn’t really know where he was.  
  
He shut his eyes obediently when they went through the last leap, and then opened them with his head turned away from the main bulk of the house, because they had agreed that Draco would get behind the wards right away and Harry would Apparate into another merry chase, carrying the mirror with him, in order to fool anyone still tracking them.  
  
“Good-bye,” Harry started to say.  
  
The words tore away from his mouth in a ragged gasp as Draco crashed abruptly into him, and he found himself falling from his broom. Harry snatched at his broom’s shaft, but caught only a handful of bristles. He swung his body to the side, and they were still beyond his reach. He grabbed his wand and started to cast a Cushioning Charm.  
  
Someone snatched his hand. Harry looked up and found Draco gripping his arm. He relaxed more than he had thought he could when dangling without a net or spell a hundred feet above the ground. Draco hadn’t been attacked, then. It was just a rogue gust of wind that had made him lose control of his broom, most likely, and he had still managed to save Harry’s life.  
  
“Thanks,” Harry said. He shifted a little to the side so that his full weight didn’t hang from his wrist. “Can you—”  
  
Draco leaned over and plucked his wand neatly from Harry’s grasp.  
  
Harry stared at him, searching carefully. But Draco’s face didn’t have the soft, slack look that it would have if someone had put him under Imperius.  
  
“Draco, what the hell?” he asked, not daring to pull too much against the hold on his wrist. He wished he had thought to bring a Levitation Potion, but he had trusted too much in his flying skills to think he’d need it.  
  
Draco smiled at him. “Now,” he said. “I think we understand each other and our _negotiating_ position. You’re going to tell me your little secret.”


	8. Call the Tune

  
“ _Draco_.”  
  
Harry had thought that if he said the word with just the right intonation, stressing both syllables equally and rolling his eyes at the same time, Draco might see how absurd it was, to keep Harry literally dangling here above the ground without his wand, while Draco’s hand must be getting tired holding up Harry’s full weight.  
  
As if answering Harry’s thoughts, the way that he seemed to be disturbingly good at, Draco smiled and spun his wand once. Harry felt the Lightening Charm creep over him, and scowled. It wouldn’t keep him from being hurt if he hit the ground, but it would make Draco feel as though he was holding something no heavier than a balloon.  
  
“You’re still a bastard,” he snapped, shaking his fringe out of his eyes and glaring up at Draco. At the moment, he would almost have welcomed Draco seeing his scar. Get this ridiculous dance out of the way, and over with.  
  
But then he remembered what he would lose, the peace and the ability to study whatever he wanted and the conversations with his friends where they didn’t have to worry about someone breaking through the wards or trying to kill the Weasleys in a jealous fit because they thought all of them were Harry’s secret lovers, and shuddered. No. He would actually almost rather die than go back to that.  
  
“Still?” Draco stretched out along his broom with that careless grace that used to annoy Harry so much when he showed it off in Potions class and smiled down at Harry, his fingers gently raking the air. “So you’re ready to admit that you did know me, before, when we were at Hogwarts?”  
  
“Didn’t you ever hear about not trusting confessions that you get under torture?” Harry shook his head and once again flung the hair out of his eyes. Sweat was starting to trickle down his forehead and get in the way of seeing Draco, and it was vital that he do that, so he could study his face for some sign of yielding. “I would probably tell you anything to get back up on the broom again.” He gritted his teeth. The Lightening Charm had lessened the pain of hanging from Draco’s grip, but his arm still hurt.  
  
“This is hardly torture,” Draco said, smiling at him. “If you would give me this one thing I want, then we could go inside the safehouse and I would treat you to a dinner of the kind that you’ve never seen.”  
  
“I thought you wanted to keep the safehouse secret,” Harry whinged, even as he remembered how the idea of having him look away had been Draco’s and how the prat had probably been planning even then to knock him off his broom and hold him like this.  
  
“I wouldn’t mind you having one of my secrets, then, when I had one of yours,” Draco murmured, and peered down at him with luminous eyes.  
  
“I fed you,” Harry said, giving up on subtler tactics and going straight for the blunt instrument. “I saved your life. I tended your wounds. I fought your enemies. That doesn’t _matter_ to you? That isn’t enough to make you let this go when I ask you to let it go?”  
  
Draco turned his head slightly to the side, a faint frown curling his lips, and Harry’s heart leaped. But the next minute, he shook his head and sighed melodramatically. “Sorry, no. More of those Slytherin faults you so deplore. I’m selfish enough to accept all that and still want to know what you’re hiding.” He gave Harry another smile. “But I will keep my promise about the dinner, if you tell me.”  
  
Harry rapidly revised his options. He could refuse, and possibly plummet to his death—or, well, no, he didn’t think the Draco he had come to know in the past few days would _really_ let that happen, but he would do something else to make Harry’s life profoundly uncomfortable. He could tell the truth, and lose everything, including the new camaraderie with Draco, who would probably think that spreading the news of the Boy-Who-Lived and _where_ he lived far and wide was sufficient payment for the betrayal of trust. He could lie, which he wasn’t much good at in the past few days.  
  
He could—  
  
He didn’t give himself time to think, because he knew if he did, Draco would probably see the decision reflected in his eyes and have enough time to react. Harry flung himself sideways, concentrating with all his might. He didn’t do wandless magic that often, only when he had to. He preferred to rely on wards and defensive potions and all the magic that he’d perfected over the years as he built his house into a fortress.  
  
But now he called, and the broom he’d ridden drifted towards him. Harry grabbed it with his free hand and swung himself around and down towards it, kicking wildly at Draco’s arm as he went.  
  
He never knew if Draco released him in sheer surprise or simply had to because of the angle that Harry was twisting at; Harry’s foot sure didn’t hit him. Either way, Harry was mounted on the broom again a second later and thrusting out his hand. “ _Accio_ wand!” he bellowed, focusing so hard that starbursts showed up in front of his eyes.  
  
His wand leaped out of Draco’s robe pocket, and—  
  
Stuck to Draco’s hand as the _utter bastard_ cast a Sticking Charm.  
  
Harry snarled and clung to the broom with both hands, leaning forwards to glare. Sadly, Draco did not cower before the awe-inspiring power of the glare and meekly restore his wand to him. He kept it, turning it around and around as though admiring the make.  
  
“Such a nice wand,” he murmured. “Holly wood, I think, and with a phoenix feather core?” Harry would have asked how he knew that—although he reckoned Unspeakable training probably let you pick up all kinds of strange things—when Draco abruptly stiffened and stared at him.  
  
“Holly,” he whispered. “Phoenix feather. There was someone who had a wand like that. Someone _important_.” He closed his eyes and apparently spent a silent minute battling his own mind before he gasped, “Why can’t I _remember_?”  
  
Harry grimaced. He needed his wand back and he needed to be gone from here, but as much as he hated to admit it, there was something he needed more. To soothe the pain on Draco’s face, to keep him from thinking that the failure was in his own mind. And he didn’t even have to tell the whole truth to do it.  
  
 _The spell would probably keep me from telling the whole truth anyway,_ he reasoned with himself as he cleared his throat. “Um, Malfoy?”  
  
Draco’s head ripped around, and he said, “For a moment there, in your inflections, I almost knew you. And you hated me.”  
  
“I was someone important during the war, yeah,” Harry said, deciding to ignore that but also to only call Draco by his first name from now on, even if the courtesy was stupid for someone who had stolen his wand. “But I did something that the Ministry _really_ didn’t approve of, and I needed to retreat for my own safety. So I cast a spell that made most people forget who I was.”  
  
Draco leaned forwards far enough that Harry started to worry _he_ would fall off, though Harry should have been able to get away without worrying about that, Merlin knew. “Including me?”  
  
Harry nodded. “Including you.”  
  
“That was—unwise,” Draco said, and Harry had the feeling that he had debated among several different words before choosing that one. “Exceedingly so. I am angry, Harry.” His voice was flat and almost casual, and he was smiling, but one look in his eyes could have told Harry the truth even if he had no familiarity with the man Draco was now.  
  
“I don’t really care,” Harry told him. “We were never friends before this, and I cared more about protecting my bloody _life_ than I did about insulting people who hated me.” Let Draco think the wards around his house were because Harry feared enemies for his imaginary mistake, rather than because he feared for his solitude.  
  
“End the spell.” Draco’s voice started out kindly and flicked like a steel whip at the end.  
  
Harry shook his head, staring into his eyes. “No. Not even if you break my wand.”  
  
Draco’s hands flexed for a moment as if he would do just that, and Harry held his breath. The next moment, Draco huffed and half-lowered his head. “Haven’t I earned some trust?” he whispered. “You’ve come to know me now, you must realize that I’ve changed since we were children. Please?”  
  
Harry’s mouth dropped open at the last word, but he shook his head. “Sorry, but no. No one who dangles me over my broom by one hand and _steals my wand_ has earned enough trust to warrant the canceling of this particular spell. Sorry,” he added again, because there was something truly wounded, and not only pretending to be so, behind the way that Draco stared at him.  
  
But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Harry sought in his mind for some reassurance that _he_ wasn’t the one being unreasonable here. He’d helped Draco. He’d told him all along that he would hate the truth if he found it out. Draco was the one who couldn’t accept that, who pushed and pushed and _pushed_ , and then had the gall to look hurt when Harry told him that he didn’t want to share anymore.  
  
Yes. Harry only felt bad because of the bloody spell. There was part of him that had always hated casting it on people, altering the way they thought about him. It sounded like something Voldemort would do (although he wouldn’t do it to keep people from paying attention to him, rather the reverse).  
  
But what else was he supposed to do, when no one else in the whole bloody wizarding world except his friends thought he deserved a normal life?  
  
“Harry.”  
  
Harry’s eyes snapped up to Draco. Draco was shifting back and forth on his broom. Harry raised his eyebrows politely. “Do you need to go to the bathroom?”  
  
Ah, yes, the look that he got back was pure poison. Harry grinned at him, relieved they had moved this back to familiar ground. This would be _so_ much easier when they were antagonists, and when he could leave.  
  
But then Draco did something stupid, something that made everything hard again. Because Draco couldn’t leave well enough _alone_.  
  
He tossed Harry’s wand to him.  
  
Harry was so busy gaping at him that he nearly fumbled the catch. Draco gave him a small smile, something that seemed odd and unshielded without the masks that Harry thought he would normally have fastened over it. “Easy to believe that you were never a Seeker, whatever your skills on the broom,” he murmured.   
  
_Let him keep on thinking that,_ Harry told himself, and swallowed the instinctive protest. “Why?” he asked, holding up his wand.  
  
“You don’t seem happy to have it back.” Draco’s grin widened, and he leaned forwards on his broom with the air of someone offering a polite favor. “I’ll be happy to take it again if you want to lend it to me.”  
  
Harry moved his hand behind his back, and Draco smiled at him in a way that told Harry he had meant him to do that. Well, fine, he would just pretend that he hadn’t noticed the smile, and talk in a normal way.  
  
“Because,” Draco said, losing the smile at last and speaking with a kind of quiet intensity that fascinated Harry far more than it should have, “I know that you’ll never give me your friendship or trust if I don’t.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “But I just admitted to casting a spell on you. Why do you want my friendship or trust?”  
  
Draco sighed. “It was a spell on everyone?” he said, while his fingers flexed up and down and gripped his broom in a way that said he would _react_ if the answer turned out to be different from what he thought it was. “Not just on me? It makes everyone in the wizarding world forget who you are?”  
  
Harry nodded. He had thought about noting the exception for his friends, but then again, Draco had the brains to figure that out for himself, given the way they had helped Harry and Draco confuse Draco’s enemies.  
  
“That makes it a little easier to tolerate than it would have been if you’d singled me out as the recipient of a grudge that I couldn’t even remember,” Draco murmured, and reached out to smooth down the bristles of his broom, behind him. He didn’t look away for more than a second at a time, or blink for longer than that, either. “I want to know who you are. I want to know who’s real, the person who helped me or the one I forgot.”  
  
“I’m both of them,” Harry snapped. And that was true. He had never felt like the Boy-Who-Lived, but he had felt like Draco’s enemy, if only because Draco had antagonized him so much. “You can’t get around it and stop being angry at me that easily.”  
  
“You think I should be?” Draco looked at him, his head on one side. “And here I could have sworn that you were agitated and upset at me being angry—at least with the anger expressed by my taking your wand and putting you in an awkward position—and would have preferred that I not be.”  
  
Harry stared at him. “Dangling me over the side of my broom and stealing my wand is a bit much even for you,” he said.  
  
“Another answer reflecting intimate knowledge of me in the past,” Draco said, and leaned back on his broom and stared up at the sky. “Now it only remains to ask _why_ you want me to be angry. What purpose it would serve. Why you didn’t want to tell me about this spell in the first place, and now expect it to do the trick of pushing me away.”  
  
“You’re tiresome,” Harry said, and made sure that his wand was indeed whole and unbroken before he turned his broom in the direction of home.  
  
“Harry.”  
  
Harry looked back. Draco was lying forwards over his broom now, arms folded and draped on the shaft, his smile so bright that looking at it made Harry’s breath come sharply. He _wished_ that he hadn’t had a dream last night about how that mouth might taste.  
  
“I think you care about me,” Draco whispered. “In fact, I’m certain of it. Someone who didn’t wouldn’t go to all this trouble to help me escape, wouldn’t care whether I lived or died.”  
  
“There’s a difference between basic compassion and thinking that someone _cares_ for you,” Harry began.  
  
“There might be, but you’ve gone above and beyond that,” Draco said. “You didn’t even ask me to apologize for what I just did. No, I think that you want me to be angry because that would make it easier for you to separate yourself from me. Forget about me. You don’t want anyone to crash through your precious barriers, and I managed. Now you want to wall yourself up again and forget it happened.”  
  
“Shouldn’t you be getting into the house before your _enemies_ find you?” Harry snapped, staring around and wondering what was keeping them. Surely Draco had been out long enough to render the part of the exercise that was meant to protect him almost useless?  
  
“But I’m not going to forget it happened,” Draco said, and gave him the kind of long, slow smile that Harry could only compare to a morning of lying in bed, sleepy and warm, and under the conviction that there was absolutely _nothing_ that he needed to do that day unless he wanted to. “This threat from my enemies can’t last forever. When it ends, then I’m going to make bloody sure that I find you and woo the answers to all my questions from your throat. Don’t forget about me.”  
  
He turned his broom towards the house, finally. Harry shook his head and yelled after him, “What makes you think that you can contact me once you’re gone? It’s not like you even know my Floo address!”  
  
Draco winked back at him over his shoulder, and kept flying. Grumbling, Harry Disapparated.  
  
*  
  
He came home late that evening exhausted, having Apparated fifteen more times with the mirror before he finally hid it in a tightly warded enclosure where he kept copies of his parents’ photographs and other things that were precious to him and might conceivably be destroyed by a direct attack on the house. The tracking spell couldn’t call from behind the wards. But the main point was that the mirror’s former owner would have felt the signal simply vanish, and not know what happened to it after that.  
  
Sighing, Harry fell into his chair and Summoned bread, cheese, and tomatoes from the kitchen with a few lazy waves of his wand. He didn’t even bother to assemble them into a sandwich, just bit and chewed and swallowed, and let the food gradually revive him.  
  
He knew he would get used to the silence of the house again. He would learn to invite someone else over for lunch or dinner if he wanted company, and in the meantime, he would have conversations with his friends and work in his gardens and study spells not related to immediate danger, the way he used to.  
  
But…  
  
He couldn’t help the feeling tugging him along low in his belly, like a chain, or the way he kept turning his head to the side to see if Draco was there.  
  
“ _Can’t help,”_ Harry thought, as he crunched his way fiercely into a slice of tomato and ignored, for once, the way that the juice ran down onto the arm of the chair, _isn’t the same thing as “needs.”_  
  
Right. And he would just have to get used to it, and stifle his impulses to go check on Draco. Draco was the first person he’d taken care of since the war who wasn’t one of his friends, he thought. That probably explained it. His saving-people thing was going into overdrive during the years when he’d barely used it.  
  
He would have to meet Draco one more time to hand over the mirror when it was safe. Or, well, they could do it by owl.  
  
 _That might be safest,_ Harry thought, as he swallowed and then shook his head.  
  
He thought that his own attachment to Draco might threaten his wards a lot more than what lay beyond them.


	9. Arrangements

  
“You all right, mate?”  
  
Harry turned around and stared at George. He had to keep his wand moving to perform the complicated round of interlinked spells that were toasting the bread, preparing the porridge, scrambling the eggs, and squeezing the orange juice into cups, but he didn’t have to look at them. “Of course,” he said, when he saw that George was staring at him with his lips wrinkled as though he’d taken a sour bite of something. That wasn’t the way he usually looked when he was about to spring a joke on Harry. Then again, why would he ask this as a serious question? “Do I look tired?”  
  
The spells tried to get out of control, and Harry forced them to stay by spinning around once and increasing the strength of the Heating and Stirring Charms. If he let them go and they splattered their breakfast all over the kitchen, then George _would_ have the right to think there was something wrong with him.   
  
“I mean that you’ve been quieter than usual,” George replied, sliding into place at the kitchen table. “And more prone to drinking last night, too. It’s _my_ job to put a respectable dent in the nation’s stockpile of Firewhisky.”  
  
Harry shook his head in wonder. George almost never referred to the “bad nights” when he needed to stay with someone who would make sure that he didn’t do anything—well, regrettable. For him to voluntarily mention his drinking meant he really was worried. Harry cracked another two eggs into a separate pan with two more flicks of his wand and then turned his wand over. Levitation Charms sprang into action, bringing a plate with two pieces of toast and marmalade and butter on the side over to land in front of George. A glass of juice joined it a minute later. George nodded his thanks and started buttering his toast, but never took his eyes off Harry.  
  
A second after that, Harry shrugged and smiled and decided that he might as well give up the pretense. He and George were friends who had seen each other at their worst. And if Harry had more than once talked George out of following Fred, well, there was the evening George had found Harry when he was about ready to find some privacy by escaping from all kinds of life, permanently. He could talk to George about this if he could talk to anyone.  
  
“I do miss Draco,” he admitted, and completed the last round of spells that would finish the eggs and bring his food over to him. He took several large bites before he continued, because food was food and came first. “And at the same time, I know nothing could ever happen between us because of the spell.”  
  
George frowned and cocked his head. “You think he’d be that upset when he found out who you really were?”  
  
Harry nodded. “Not so much because of who I was, but because of the combination of who I was and that I tricked him, as he saw it. He might think a fitting revenge was spreading the news of where I am.”  
  
George hesitated, then said, “I don’t know if Malfoy would do it. Not the way he is now.”  
  
Harry had harbored his own doubts last night, but he’d come to the same kind of gloomy answer he had to give George now. “Maybe not. But if there’s even the chance, I can’t risk it. This life is more important to me than anything else, George. Five years, seven years, down the road, it might not be. But for now, I like my life and I don’t want it to change.”  
  
Hermione would have persisted, and even Ron would have, although Hermione would have wanted to make Harry explore his feelings more and Ron would have wanted some reassurance that Harry would never take up with Draco again. But George knew how to let things go, a lesson Harry himself had taught him. They spent the rest of breakfast talking about Quidditch, the joke shop, Fleur’s next pregnancy, and how hard it was to date when your dating partners didn’t have any idea of who you really were.  
  
Harry waved to George as he left through the Floo and began to wash the dishes, slowly and thoughtfully. His friends had all come back unharmed from their wild flight with the robes and the decoy tracking spells, and Draco should be safe now until he could make contact with someone uncorrupted in the Ministry. Harry had his peace and his quiet and his privacy back.  
  
It was all he could wish for.  
  
*  
  
Or so he thought, until a small grey owl soared in through his wards the next afternoon, hooting gently. Harry recognized George’s Perseus and held up his arm to use for a landing pad. Perseus was almost as small as Pig, but a good deal calmer, and polite enough never to shit on Harry’s robes.  
  
Perseus usually delivered ingredients that were too delicate to send with someone Flooing in, so Harry was surprised when he held out a letter instead. And that the handwriting on the envelope wasn’t George’s.  
  
Harry stared at those sharp, precise letters that looked etched or carved on the parchment instead of written, and shivered. He hadn’t seen any like them in over ten years, but he thought he knew what they were.  
  
He opened it.  
  
 _Dear Harry,  
  
Please don’t be angry that I contacted your friend in order to communicate with you. The twins seemed the most Slytherin of the Weasleys when I knew them, and I thought he might enjoy the joke, if nothing else.  
  
I have contacted the only one of my superiors at the Ministry whom I know to be immune to the promises and bribes of my enemies—he has a considerable fortune of his own and a dedication to collecting Dark artifacts—and explained the situation to him. He should be able to extract me soon and find out who in our Department is compromised. But I would like to see you again. If nothing else, you can deliver the mirror to me most safely, in three days, at the Ministry._  
  
 _And in everything else, I miss you.  
  
Draco._  
  
Harry blinked at the parchment, then snorted. Of course. Draco must have learned that trying to owl or Floo Harry when he didn’t have any way to get through his wards was useless, so he had to use the owl of someone Harry trusted instead. Harry hadn’t thought up ways to counter that particular measure, mostly because he hadn’t thought any of his friends would trust Draco enough to let him borrow their owls.  
  
But. Well. Now that Draco had reached out to him and Perseus had brought the message, Harry couldn’t say he was displeased.  
  
He was the one who had to be cautious, not Draco, Harry thought as he went to write a response. Draco had honest intentions as far as they went. They were just sneaky Slytherin intentions, too. Find out the secret, woo Harry—if he had really meant that part—and get the mirror he had risked his life for to safety.  
  
It was Harry who had to distrust every gesture that he wanted to make towards Draco, the temptation to reach out, the temptation to touch him and keep on touching.   
  
Sure, he might have a little pleasure in the short term, and he’d enjoy having Draco—the one he knew now—as a friend and lover. But inevitably, that would shatter the spell, and what he’d worked for in the long term would vanish.   
  
_He could never forgive me. For seeing him at his weakest, for doing spells that he can’t do, for tricking him like that._  
  
So Harry wrote a letter that he thought of as restrained and calm, and sent it back with Perseus for George to pass on to Draco.  
  
 _Dear Draco,_  
  
 _Sure, I can meet you in three days. Just let me know the place and the time. So far, I haven’t seen any sign that your enemies are still trying to break through my wards, so they might have given up._  
  
 _I miss you, too.  
  
Harry._  
  
*  
  
Although he’d cast spell after spell around himself at the warded location where he’d stored the mirror and seen no sign that anyone was following him or hiding and watching him, Harry truly relaxed only when he stepped into the Ministry’s Atrium. There were corrupt members of the Department of Mysteries, sure, if he believed Draco, but from this moment on, the mirror was someone else’s problem. The Unspeakables would have to prevent the theft if it happened here.  
  
Harry was going to get back to his quiet life after this. Any day now.  
  
As promised, Draco and a cloaked Unspeakable with a glamour over his face that concealed any hint of his features were waiting to meet him. Draco wore a set of plain, dark grey robes that might mark him as a member of almost any Department—  
  
And a smile that flooded across his face the moment he saw Harry and made Harry freeze between one step and another out of the Floo.  
  
Harry shook his head, hard, in the next second, and walked towards Malfoy, as he had to think of him, holding out the locked and warded box in which he’d put the mirror. Draco reached out to take it from him with one hand. The other promptly brushed delicately up and down Harry’s wrist, and then turned over, clasping his hand and holding it.  
  
Harry’s face heated up, but he didn’t want to tear his hand away from Draco in a public place like this. For one thing, that could cause a scandal of sorts for Draco. No one knew who Harry was now, no one cared, but to have someone reject Draco so harshly would start the rumors circulating again that he was a Death Eater, or that he must have done _something_ to make a total stranger back away from him. Harry wanted his bright, uninterrupted future, but he could care about Draco’s, too.  
  
For another thing, it felt really bloody good.  
  
“And this is what you risked your life for, Mr. Malfoy.” Out in the open, of course, the senior Unspeakable wouldn’t use Draco’s title, since it seemed sort of a secret that he was part of the Department, Harry reasoned. It helped him calm the way he wanted to bristle to Draco’s defense. “I see. Well. It does seem to be real.” The Unspeakable folded the box in large gloves and bowed to them both. “As requested, your holiday begins now.”  
  
Harry blinked at the man’s back as he walked away, and then Draco altered his clasp on Harry’s hand to one on his arm that slid slowly towards his shoulder. Harry turned to look up at him. Draco had cleverly almost insinuated Harry into his arms.  
  
Harry took a careful step backwards and fixed Draco with a stare he thought would bring out the answers. Draco stood there and smiled at him instead.  
  
“It’s _so_ good to see you,” he murmured at last, in a voice that sounded choked. “ _Merlin_.” He shook his head, his smile widening. “I wondered if you had glamour charms on your house to make you seem more appealing, but if anything, you’re even more attractive when you’re a little unsure of yourself.”  
  
Harry took a deep breath and reminded himself that he was still a powerful wizard who had survived the war and done Draco a favor. No reason to gape like this. “You don’t really know me,” he said. “Who I was. Who I am.”  
  
“I know that you’re stubborn,” Draco said calmly, the grip of his hand tightening. “That you’ll go out of your way to help a stranger in need. That you knew who I was from the beginning and that you hate my father, but you never acted as though you despised me because of it. That you’re clever, and accomplished, and enthusiastic about life, and a fairly good cook.” He leaned towards Harry. “I got them to agree that I could have a holiday the moment they received the mirror, since I can’t count the days I spent recuperating as days off work. Come out to dinner with me.”  
  
Harry regained his feet. This was a _concrete_ action. Something he could say yes or no to. Something that didn’t have anything to do with the future he hadn’t yet glimpsed, and nothing to do with the feelings for Draco—were they?—that coiled and pushed under his breastbone.  
  
“No,” he said. “I’m sorry, but no.”  
  
Draco narrowed his eyes, and then shrugged. Harry thought he would let go then and step away, but it didn’t seem to be what he was made for. “First offer, perhaps I shouldn’t have expected you to agree,” Draco said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up. Do I have your permission to owl you directly?”  
  
Harry took Draco’s hand, folded the fingers into his palm, and squeezed gently. “Think about this objectively, Draco,” he said quietly. “Does this seem like something that will content you? Help you? Something we _should_ be doing?”  
  
“I’m not used to thinking of my life in blocks of goals that way, whatever you may have heard about Slytherins.” Draco’s teeth were bared, and he looked simultaneously gentle and threatening. “I don’t concern myself as much with the proprieties as you might think.”  
  
Harry sighed, and squeezed his hand again. “Think about what I told you.” He wouldn’t mention the spell here, not in the open, even in the guarded way that he sometimes talked about it with Ron and Hermione. Too many listening ears. “Do you really want to date someone who holds that secret over you?”  
  
Draco stared at him for a few moments. Then he said, “Harry, what are you afraid that I would do if you told me the truth?”  
  
“Hate me,” Harry said, because it was the truth, although he _did_ think it was a truth Draco could have figured out for himself. “Take revenge on me.”  
  
“Destroy your life, the way I might have done with a Gryffindor in school?” Draco shook his head. “If you haven’t picked up on it, I’m not that person anymore. It’s true that I might be disappointed or shocked, but that’s a far cry from destroying someone’s life.” He looked Harry in the eyes and repeated gently, “Have dinner with me.”  
  
Harry grimaced. He would have to risk this, would have to give away another piece of the truth. Luckily, Hermione had reassured him yesterday that there was nothing that would break the spell except Draco really coming to care for him. No matter how Harry hinted to him, he wouldn’t suddenly get his memories back that way. “Yes, all right. Disappointment, shock, those things I could live with, enough to tell you. Because I don’t like keeping this secret from someone I’ve come to—know.”  
  
“You were going to use a different verb than that,” Draco accused him, his eyes bright and lively. “What was it? Tell me.”  
  
“God, you’re _exhausting_ ,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “Always digging for compliments, aren’t you? You can’t let it _go_. Dating you would be the same way.”  
  
“I _do_ ,” Draco said, pausing as though to evaluate the fairness of the complaint before he continued speaking, “always exhaust my partners. That much is true.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes again and pushed with one hand at Draco’s chest. Draco swayed a step back, but maintained the hold, and the smile.  
  
“If those were the only things you would feel,” Harry said, doggedly returning to the original question, “then yes, I could put up with telling you the truth, and watching you walk away from me.”  
  
Draco shook his head. “Not that. You’d have to throw me out. And the next time I’m in your house, you needn’t think I’ll leave so easily.”  
  
Harry stared at Draco, knowing that he looked star-struck, the way that people had so often looked around him, his lips parted and his pulse speeding along in his wrist and his chest and his throat.  
  
And then he clenched his fists and reminded himself. These feelings weren’t genuine. Harry might have seen the real Draco, but Draco hadn’t seen the real Harry. He couldn’t connect all these ideas and emotions about someone who might as well have been a stranger to the old memories. It wasn’t _fair,_ what Harry was doing to him.  
  
Harry ended up closing his eyes and sighing. “It would be one thing if you were surprised,” he repeated, voice thin. “But you’d hate me. I mean it, Draco,” he added, because he recognized the indrawn breath that said Draco was going to argue. “I was someone you hated. For the kind of reasons that both our sides hated each other in the war, but for personal ones, too. It’s not going to work.”  
  
Silence. Harry broke free of Draco’s holds on him, one by one, and then stepped back and met his eyes. Draco only shook his head a little, eyes wide and dazed and dark.  
  
“Who _were_ you?” he whispered. “I want you, and I want you _back_.”  
  
At the moment, Harry wasn’t going to stay around to analyze all the things that word could mean. He just nodded, smiled, said, “I’m glad you’re safe,” and started walking.  
  
Draco didn’t call after him. Harry looked over his shoulder when he neared the Floo, though, hoping Draco had gone back to the Department of Mysteries, and found him watching Harry instead, staring, his arms folded.  
  
Harry sighed. A gesture like that was at least a sign of anger, and he thought he could work with that. It might allow Draco to get over his temporary obsession. He waved at Draco and stepped into the Floo.  
  
 _It does nothing for me, though._


	10. Hot Pursuit

  
_Since you won’t let me contact you any other way, I borrowed your friend Weasley’s owl again._  
  
That was the way Draco’s letter opened. Perseus had come early that morning and sat on Harry’s pillow, staring into his face, until Harry got tired of pretending he didn’t care about owl-talons so close to his eyes and sat up. Then Perseus had dropped the letter triumphantly into his lap and leaped up on the perch that Harry kept for him in a corner. Harry shook his head and opened it.  
  
 _And you’re an idiot._  
  
“What definition of wooing does that fit under, then?” Harry muttered, and held the letter up to the light. He’d slept poorly, spent half the night worrying whether he was doing the wrong thing by keeping knowledge of his real self from Draco or the wrong thing by not allowing him closer, and then the other half having nightmares. About what would happen if he told Draco the truth, or at least _might_ happen. If Draco told other people, then it was back to constant owls, crazed fans under the bed, photographers climbing out of his closets, no life and no time to call his own.  
  
This time, he might really finish what George had interrupted.  
  
Harry sighed and focused on the letter in front of him, snagging his glasses from the table beside the bed. He’d managed to read what was there so far without them, but Draco’s writing grew smaller and more cramped towards the bottom of the page, as though he’d become angrier and angrier as he wrote. No surprise _there_.  
  
 _Do you know how rarely I offer to someone what I’ve offered to you? And it’s not just because of my past or because I’m an Unspeakable that I have to be cautious. It’s because I so rarely find someone_ worth _the kind of burning desire I want to unleash on you, someone who’s capable of being my equal._  
  
Harry grinned hard at Perseus. “Nice to see His Arrogance hasn’t changed,” he said, and wondered if he should just crumple up the letter now and save everyone a lot of trouble.  
  
But in the end, he sighed and kept on reading. Because he hadn’t really offered to anyone else what he’d offered to Draco, either. Granted, that was because everyone he knew now, really _knew,_ was already in the secret of the spell and no one else had broken through his wards the way Draco had, but it was still an exception. He knew something about the fascination that Draco seemed to think burned between them.  
  
 _You deny and hide and lie and deny again. Tell me why I should give you another chance. Tell me why you deserve to be courted._  
  
 _Draco._  
  
Harry lay back and stared up at the ceiling. “Did he really think that would get me angry enough to respond?” he asked Perseus, who ruffled his feathers and looked around as though anticipating treats. Harry used a lazy wave of his wand to float over the canister of them that he kept on top of the wardrobe. “I reckon he did.”  
  
He shook his head and looked at the letter again. Yes, in some ways it would be so much simpler if he turned his back now. Draco knew what he wanted, but what he wanted was a shadow, a phantom, a Harry Potter who didn’t exist, who _couldn’t,_ because he and Draco had only been friends for a fortnight, and enemies for a lifetime.  
  
But he was going to answer it, because if Draco was this angry he deserved some response. Perhaps Harry could even find a way through the maze, a way to reassure Draco and yet keep his desired privacy.  
  
Maybe.  
  
 _But when have I ever taken the safe option? It would have been safer not to let him stay here in the first place, to take him to Ron and Hermione the instant I realized what was going on. If I’d taken him through my Floo, his enemies wouldn’t have had any idea where he’d gone. There were other options._  
  
There were now, too, but he made the choice to pick up his quill and write.  
  
*  
  
“Is it safe for you to be out without a minder?”  
  
Draco’s voice spoke with a sharp hiss. He was standing outside the iron gates of Malfoy Manor, where he’d told Harry to meet him, with a grey cloak around his shoulders and his head lifted in that same old way. For a moment, Harry let the years roll away, let himself be transported back to Hogwarts. Maybe it was _that_ simple. If he could hate Draco again, then he certainly wouldn’t want him to come around.  
  
But in the end, he simply shook his head and let the impossibility go. “I could ask the same of you,” he retorted. “Did the Department of Mysteries decide that your enemies weren’t going to take vengeance?”  
  
For a moment, Draco blinked, and drew his head back. Harry wondered if he wasn’t used to being scolded, or wasn’t used to being worried about. It could have been either. Draco probably still had his friends, his family, his lovers, but his job would keep some of the intimate details of his life hidden. Perhaps Harry was the first one who had ever figured out the details of what Draco did on his own without having to be told.  
  
That was—that had no _reason_ to light a fire of such dense red satisfaction in the middle of Harry’s belly, it really didn’t.  
  
“They did,” Draco said at last. “They’ve had a few attacks on the Department already, probing for the mirror, but no one seemed interested in me even when I went out in public. The meeting I had with you in the Atrium was a test of that kind.” He leaned back with a thin smile and cocked his eyebrows at Harry. “I presume that I don’t need to ask _you_ if you’ve been safe, not with those iron wards of yours.”  
  
“Sometimes someone gets past the barriers,” Harry said, and let whatever he was feeling fill his eyes as he looked at Draco. If Draco was smart, it would drive him away, the uncertainty and the exasperation and the liking.  
  
Draco wasn’t smart, or maybe Harry wasn’t. He bit his lip and nodded, reaching out with one hand. “Come on,” he whispered. “Come in.”  
  
Harry stepped through the gates, and couldn’t help shivering for a moment as he saw the house. He had never been back here since the war, but he could remember Hermione’s helpless screams as Bellatrix tortured her, the cold air of the cellars that Dobby had pulled them out of, and the way that the Snatchers had dragged him to the front door.  
  
And the way that Draco had refused to identify him, and the way his face had looked when Harry snatched at his wand. Harry couldn’t help looking down, seeking and finding the hawthorn wand as Draco gestured with it to shut the iron gates.  
  
Draco saw him looking and smiled. “Want to touch mine, since I touched yours?” he murmured, voice full of filthy innuendo, and held it out.  
  
Harry hesitated before he touched it. He didn’t know what, if anything, this would tell Draco. But in the end he decided on the risk, because even if Draco picked up some sensation from it, even if the wand remembered Harry, he wouldn’t know the circumstances, time or place. Harry thought he had to trust in the spell more often. It had guarded him for several years now, including in front of Aurors he had worked with. They knew him better than Draco had.  
  
His finger connected with the hawthorn wood—  
  
And he felt a distinct _thrum_ travel up his arm, and Draco gasped and took a step away, his jaw hanging with shock.  
  
“Harry,” he whispered. He didn’t ask. He simply extended his wand the rest of the way between them and laid it along Harry’s arm.  
  
Harry shuddered. It felt as though Draco had pushed magic into him. He swayed on his feet and clutched at the iron gates, remembering only too late that they were warded and might sting him. But perhaps that didn’t happen from the inside, or perhaps Draco didn’t will it to happen, because he felt nothing.  
  
Nothing except the shake of remembered power in his muscles and Draco’s bright, awe-filled stare.  
  
“How much of my own past did you take from me?” Draco whispered, his words angry but his voice quiet, half-worshiping, as if he admired Harry’s cleverness even as it hurt him. _Perhaps he does at that,_ Harry thought as he gulped air. _Slytherins are capable of some fairly twisted things._ “You must have taken my wand at some point, used it or touched it. What do I not remember because of you?”  
  
Harry shivered, then relaxed. This just showed how powerful the spell was, if it could make Draco forget about the Boy-Who-Lived stealing his wand during the war, or simply disconnect those memories from the rest of his mind so that he couldn’t make the link between Harry and the person who had stolen his wand.  
  
 _This is cruel._  
  
His own voice that time, speaking softly and securely inside his head, without any need for Hermione’s morality at all. Harry winced and shook his head, not in denial of his words, but of Draco’s.  
  
“I told you how the spell works, what it is,” he said, and held Draco’s eyes. “Maybe it would be for the best if you just let me walk back through those gates right now, before I do anything else that you don’t like.”  
  
Draco surged forwards across the distance between them and caught Harry’s wrists in a crushing grasp. Harry flexed his hands and got them in a position from which he could throw off Draco’s grip as soon as he needed to. Draco didn’t notice, though, or else didn’t care. He bent down and spat the words into Harry’s ear, complete with flying saliva.  
  
“That’s what you _want_ me to do. That would make everything _easier_ for you, wouldn’t it? If I just backed off and left all these secrets unexplored, all these questions unasked? Then you would go merrily on your way and not have to live with someone confronting you, and forcing you to think about _what you’ve done._ ”  
  
Harry swung to the side and shook his arms, and Draco stumbled, flying back towards the gates. He caught himself before he slammed into them and watched Harry with eyes that shone, his hands still opening and closing.  
  
Harry stalked the distance between them and leaned near enough to make Draco’s eyes cross.  
  
“That’s the sign that you really know nothing about me, if you think I used this spell lightly,” he whispered. “And that’s the sign that you need to care about yourself first, and not me. This isn’t worth it, is it? Not the way I’ve betrayed and tricked you, made you _forget._ I’ve violated the integrity of your mind. I don’t think I could forgive that if someone did it to me. The question is, can you, or should I walk away?”  
  
“You try to go outside those gates and I’ll kill you myself,” Draco said.  
  
Harry let his wand fall into his hand and his power gather around him, not released, but thrumming in the air hard enough to make Draco wince and raise a hand to his jaw, where his teeth would be aching. “I’d like to see you try,” Harry said, evenly.  
  
For a long moment, they glared at each other. Harry swallowed against the excitement in his throat, excitement that could easily cause other unwanted reactions. This was explosive, sure, and an interesting change from the routine that had seemed boring since Draco came, but it was also probably the reason that they would never be good friends or lovers. Even when Draco knew nothing about his past with Harry, they ended up reacting to each other like this.  
  
Then the moment passed, and Draco half-lowered his head and gave Harry a crooked smile. “I’ll remember that,” he said. “Your power, and the way you react when I threaten to kill you. It’s something new to add to the memories I have of you taking care of me.”  
  
Harry blinked for a moment, completely thrown, and then lowered his wand. “You aren’t going to take the threat more personally?” he asked.  
  
Draco snorted. “You didn’t take the threat to kill you personally, or at least it didn’t look like you did. Should I get upset because you were prepared to defend yourself?”  
  
Harry shrugged, thinking of some of the ways that his “fans” had reacted when they found themselves pinned to the wall with his wand up against their throat. Bursting into tears or astonished indignation that they couldn’t sneak up on him or break into his home unannounced had been the least of it. “Some people have.”  
  
“Those people are ridiculous, then.” Smoothly, Draco stepped away from the gates and into Harry’s personal space once more. “I hope I have more sense than that.” He reached down and gently teased Harry’s fingers apart, insinuating his fingers in between them. “Come inside with me. Have a nice meal.”  
  
Harry looked up at him and spent a moment studying his face. This Draco seemed a lot more unpredictable than the one he’d known in school, but, well, of _course_ Harry would see him like that, wouldn’t he, when he didn’t know him well? Perhaps the Slytherin schoolboy had been capable of spontaneity, too, inside the walls of the dungeons. It wasn’t like Harry would have been able to tell.  
  
“All right,” he said, and tried not to either blush or roll his eyes when Draco picked up his hand and kissed the back of it.  
  
*  
  
“…We have thirty-six bedrooms. This, of course, makes the Manor better than your house.”  
  
Harry smiled temperately at Draco and took another bite of what Draco claimed was fish cooked in some sort of coconut sauce. Harry hadn’t decided whether that was a load of bollocks or not. What really mattered was that the food was good, and he didn’t have to cook for himself for once, or worry about the food being dosed with a poison or a love potion.  
  
At least, he didn’t _think_ he did.  
  
“At least I _use_ all my space,” he said, letting the dark drink, not quite wine and not quite juice, that Draco had provided with dinner roll around on his tongue. “When was the last time that you were in some of these thirty-six bedrooms, or let them out to other people?”  
  
Draco put an elbow on the table and leaned forwards, smiling at him. Harry resisted the temptation to point out that elbows on the table was bad manners and leaned a corresponding distance back in his own chair, smiling in turn.  
  
“If you like,” Draco said, “we could spend time in every one of them. A new bed every night. A new window to look out of while I fuck you over the bed. What do you think of that?”  
  
“I think I’m grateful that I wasn’t swallowing right then,” Harry said, and carefully put his glass down on the table, shaking his head. “Do you really think that coming to dinner means I’m going to let you do _that_?”  
  
“I could only think of one reason why you wouldn’t.” Draco’s face was carefully blank, his head half-bowed, his voice soft.  
  
“Tell me, then.” Harry wondered if Draco had finally thought of an objection that Harry hadn’t, something that really _would_ separate them. He was in such a strange half-state about that, he thought. On the one hand, he didn’t want to leave. Draco was fascinating, he was funny—or at least, Harry found him funny when he was making fun of people who weren’t Harry and his friends, the way he had all through dinner with the witty stories he’d told—and Harry felt fully alive around him.  
  
On the other hand, how much of that would survive when and if Draco learned the truth? It would shred his self-confidence, his memories, the way he acted towards Harry. Better, perhaps, to go before that all happened, if he could only persuade himself to do so.  
  
But he had accepted that if Draco reached out, he would respond, so Draco was the one who would probably have to separate them if they were going to be.  
  
“If you have another lover,” Draco said, and lifted his head and produced another perfect smile, if more predatory than the ones he’d worn so far. “You don’t strike me as the type to be unfaithful, if only because your lover would probably be as fierce as you are and kill you if you tried. I know _I_ would never let someone like you go.”  
  
“How inspiring,” Harry said dryly, while he tried not to show how dry his throat was and how his hands had closed in on each other beneath the table. “Someone who apparently wants to see me dead and despises my house for its small size. How _ever_ could I refuse?”  
  
Draco only smiled and leaned back, toying with his own glass. “You can choose to stay,” he said. “Or leave for now, and I’ll invite you back another time. Your choice.” He leaned forwards just enough for his shadow to touch the edge of Harry’s plate, and then stopped. “Always yours,” he whispered, his eyes lingering on Harry’s.  
  
Harry believed that. He really did. But it just threw him back into the middle of his indissoluble problem, which was that he thought he should stop reacting to Draco but couldn’t as long as Draco was willing to act.  
  
Draco’s smile turned bright as snow. “Well?” he asked. “Your choice, Harry. Stay or go.”  
  
And the moment lingered, and turned on Harry’s breath, and still he had no idea of what to say.


	11. Twist and Turn

  
“One more time,” Draco said when they had sat in silence for some minutes, his voice so soft, so gently falling, that Harry thought it would bury him. Like the snow his smile resembled, like the softness and coldness that appeared to have settled between them. Harry shook his head. His mind was wandering. “Are you going to stay or go?”  
  
Harry locked eyes with Draco. His mind was still spinning, but he knew what Draco meant. Draco shouldn’t have to make the choice. Or perhaps he had already made his choice. He had told Harry over and over again what he wanted, after all.  
  
 _Maybe I should trust him to know what he wants. Maybe I should trust him to enjoy the moment, no matter what happens later._  
  
“This time?” Harry asked, and stood. “I think…” He twirled the glass of the dark drink that Draco had given him between his fingers for a few minutes, his eyes fastened on Draco’s face.  
  
Draco winced and half-lowered his head. It was clear what he thought Harry’s answer would be.  
  
And it was that which _decided_ it.  
  
“I’m going to stay,” Harry said, and put his glass down, and leaned across the table to put his mouth on Draco’s.  
  
It didn’t stay that way for very long. Draco surged to his feet and got himself around the table with a sliding, snake-like movement that Harry honestly wouldn’t have thought he was capable of, into Harry’s arms and up against his body. Harry strived back against him, thrilling to the way that Draco pushed, and shoved, and directed him towards the far wall of the dining room.  
  
Of course it wouldn’t do for Draco to think he could always be in control because Harry was letting him be right now, but he had to give him credit for effort.  
  
And for making him feel _really_ bloody good.  
  
Draco pinned him to the wall at last, and kissed him, and kissed him, until Harry was moaning, weak-legged and weak-headed, half-drugged. Draco kept pulling away just when Harry thought the kiss would go on, and then diving back again before Harry could get enough air. There was tongue everywhere, and arms pressing close around him, still pulling and tugging although Harry didn’t think he presented much resistance now.  
  
 _Always the challenge,_ Harry thought, leaning his head back and gasping in the air, feeling his heart hurry and thump along beneath his ribs. _Always the bloody competition between us. Although I reckon we want the same thing right now._  
  
Draco’s hand dropped, pressing him between the legs. Harry rose onto his toes in surprise, and then deliberately put his feet flat and ground himself against Draco’s palm, watching his mouth fall open and his breathing explode in pants.  
  
“Anything you can do, I can do, too,” Harry muttered at him, and then carried the battle to Draco, kissing him, nipping at his lips and then tugging his mouth away to go to work on Draco’s neck. Some of his lovers in the past—the disguised ones, the ones he had without them knowing he was Harry Potter—had really liked this.  
  
 _What will he think, what will he do, if he finds out?_  
  
But Harry put that concern firmly to the side for now, and concentrated on the fact that he was making Draco feel as good as Draco had made him feel. Draco seemed to be thinking that way, too, if the way he pointed his cock at Harry and jerked his hips was any indication.  
  
Harry winked at him and knelt down, curving his wand around Draco’s legs in a slow, sensuous gesture. Cloth unraveled behind the movements of the wand, coiling and falling, and Draco’s eyes darkened.  
  
“You’re paying for those,” he pointed out.  
  
“I look forward to how you’ll make me do that,” Harry said, and then lunged up to take Draco’s mouth in his own. Draco clung to him with hands gone greedy, with fingers become claws, trying to get under his shirt and hurt him or hold him, Harry wasn’t sure which. He shivered and went back down so that he was kneeling, and opened his mouth.  
  
“Wait,” Draco whispered.  
  
Harry blinked and stared at him in something he had to admit was close to disbelief. Draco wanted him to _stop,_ just when they were getting close to what his body obviously yearned for?  
  
But because it was what Draco had said he wanted, he waited, balancing himself on one knee and clutching a bit at Draco’s legs to hold himself there and keep from toppling.  
  
“I want you,” Draco said, and then drew him up, kissing him again, more of those kisses that went so deep they stole Harry’s air and balance and sense of the world. When he opened his eyes again, the room was slowly revolving, and Draco had become the one who knelt, backing Harry into the wall with his elbows and his eyes, as insistent in their push as the elbows themselves.  
  
“What—what are you doing?” Harry’s tongue was powdery. He shook his head and tried to clear his throat as he repeated it.  
  
“Wanting you,” Draco said, and the smile cracked his face like lightning going home. “Having you.”  
  
His hands curled around Harry’s knees, smooth and confident, and then his hips. He lowered his head and his tongue flickered out, touching the damp front of Harry’s trousers. The next moment—although Harry was so dazed that he could easily have missed a flick from Draco’s wand—Harry’s clothes were gone and Draco’s mouth was yearning forwards, inch by inch across the space that parted them.  
  
Harry let his head fall back, his arms hang down on either side of his body. He did something he hadn’t done in years, and—and—  
  
Surrendered.  
  
Draco felt it, from the way his hands tightened. He was licking, slobbering, moving his mouth in wide and random circles Harry had never felt before. Harry’s mouth fell open in answer to it, the moan shaking his throat as he uttered it.  
  
There it was, Draco’s tongue circling, probing, touching him one moment near the head, the next near the bottom, the next on the shaft, scraping and lapping, making Harry arch his hips, and whimper, and try to retreat, but there was nowhere to go, nothing behind him but the wall, nothing inside his head but the warmth, no _escape._  
  
Nowhere to retreat. Nowhere to hide.  
  
His hands flattened out and he cried, a small, gasping sound that made Draco snarl. His hands pressed down so hard that Harry felt the flesh on his hips dent beneath them, and he rolled his head back and looked down.  
  
Draco was watching him with eyes so brilliant they _burned_. Harry tried to fall backwards, and Draco’s eyes were there, more than his hands, holding him up.  
  
“Come for me,” Draco said, in words that Harry thought he must hear in his head more than with his ears, as busy as Draco’s mouth was. “Come to me, for me, with me, _be_ with me—”  
  
Harry thrust forwards and let himself go, and it was an escape after all, a running through, a shining, the heat was out of him and in him and through him, and—  
  
And he was on the floor with Draco still on his knees in front of him, cradling Harry’s face beneath his hands, kissing him, touching his cheeks and his cheekbones with fascination that made Harry flush. He raised his head and captured Draco’s mouth in a kiss, because he wanted to, and because it was one way to make the touch stop.  
  
Then he reached for Draco’s cock. His thoughts chattered and fell around each other. He knew what he wanted to do, but he wanted to do something _more,_ he wanted to make it as intense for Draco as it had been for him.  
  
Draco’s hand fell on his, and found it, and squeezed. “Please?” he whispered, staring at Harry as if he wanted to stare _through_ Harry.  
  
Harry shivered. Yes, that was what he wanted, too. “Yes,” he said. “Please do it.” He fell backwards and opened his legs, smiling up at Draco.  
  
Draco stared at him, then smiled a little and held out a hand to help him up. “We can go into the bedroom,” he whispered. “You deserve soft sheets and those windows with the views I told you about.”  
  
“And you deserve to shut up and give me what I want,” Harry said, and with a flick of power that only partially came from his wand, scythed Draco’s legs from under him so he fell on the floor, sprawling only a few inches from Harry’s feet. “Which is for you to fuck me right here and now.”  
  
Draco stared at him for a few minutes. Then he was on top of Harry, and crawling so that their chests were pressed together, and his mouth was once again luring Harry into a daze. Harry resisted it this time, though, biting at Draco’s mouth and licking at his neck the way he had when they first started, and Draco laughed quietly and called a small bottle to him with a nonverbal Summoning Charm.  
  
He sat back with his eyes so bright that they seemed to be roasting Harry from the inside. “I want to know where you learned how to be so sexy,” he muttered, and started to coat his fingers with the shimmering oil.  
  
“Not the same school you went to, obviously.” Harry shook his head and reached for the lube. “Give me that.”  
  
Draco blinked, but surrendered the bottle. Harry made sure to cover both his hands generously, and then reached back and down and plunged his fingers into his arse. He hissed and winced a little when he did, but the pain would go away. Usually it went away immediately when he got a proper fucking.  
  
And Draco might need a little help, but Harry still intended to see that he gave him one.  
  
His fingers reached in deep, but not deep enough, and he cast a charm that would keep his legs suspended in the air and his arse raised before he continued. Yes, that was better. Though he still had to twist with his arms a little, and bent his head all the way to the side, he managed to reach.  
  
“You,” Draco whispered, and stopped.  
  
Harry glanced up, and discovered that the reason he had stopped was because his mouth was overflowing with saliva. Harry grinned smugly and reached in even further, adding a third finger this time with a squeaking sound. It forced a soft grunt from his lips, but that was what lips were _for,_ after all. Or at least at a time like this.  
  
“I want you,” Draco said, and held out a hand as though he assumed Harry would cover it with lube.  
  
Harry spun the bottle and cast another charm, this one purely wandless, that made oil pour out of it and coat Draco’s erection. Draco sucked in a surprised breath and arched his hips. Harry canceled the charm that held his legs in the air, waited a moment to be sure that his tingling calves would support him, and then came over and forced Draco down and back, onto his heels and haunches. Draco stared at him, lips parted, mouth and eyes overflowing.  
  
“Yes, I think,” Harry said, and then sighed and worked himself backwards until he had Draco inside him, and then the glorious stretch stole whatever words he might have been about to say.  
  
It was tricky, half-bouncing and half-riding Draco’s lap, his legs falling in several silly directions until he locked them around Draco’s hips. Then he was sweating, and both of them didn’t get any leverage for a few seconds, rocking back and forth, and Harry laughed aloud and looked up into Draco’s face.  
  
“Not—everything you imagined?” he panted.  
  
Draco kissed him hard enough to drive his tongue back down his throat, and then gentled the kiss while wrapping his arms around Harry’s shoulders. He didn’t speak, couldn’t speak, but his arms rippled, and he told Harry what he wanted to do that way, moving them both back and forth. Together, they arranged themselves so they _did_ have some leverage, and Draco began to fuck him as if they were on a rocking horse.  
  
Harry kept giggling; he couldn’t help it. He could feel the quivers traveling up Draco’s legs. He was incredibly strong, to do it this way, but that wouldn’t last long, and he’d probably fall down flat when they gave out.  
  
So Harry kissed him again and took him over backwards, until Draco was lying flat and Harry could get some _real_ speed going. He hissed in approval as Draco’s cock finally made pleasure absolutely flash through him, and he knocked Draco’s hands away when he tried to reach up and help.  
  
“Lie back and think of _me_ ,” he whispered, and began once more to bounce. Shudders and shocks shot through him; Draco’s face changed, his jaw dangling, his tongue scraping up and down his lips as though he thought they might need moistening, cleaning.  
  
Harry kissed him silly again, and gave a particularly hard bounce that made Draco arch up urgently. Harry grinned, did it again. It made him burn in all sorts of ways when Draco was that deep inside him, and Draco’s eyes were falling shut, and this was having an _effect_ on him. That was what Harry wanted, to make the master of arrogant letters and more arrogant convictions react.  
  
So he bounced, and bounced, and bounced, and his thighs ached and his arse burned and clenched. His own cock tried a few feeble times to come back to life, but that didn’t matter. Harry linked his arms behind his head, and rode, and enjoyed himself.   
  
Sometimes he felt the pressure of the thoughts that were waiting for them outside this enchanted moment. About Draco, and the spell, and what he would do, what he would think—  
  
Harry felt the minute pulses and twitches inside his arse that indicated Draco was about to come. Well, and also the way Draco had gone still beneath him and breathed stiffly through his arched chest was kind of a cue.  
  
Harry judged the moment to a nicety, and bent down and whispered in Draco’s ear, “Are you going to come for me?”  
  
Draco’s hips jutted up, and the answer was _yes, yes, yes,_ both inside and outside, through the ragged gasps that he whispered into Harry’s mouth.  
  
*  
  
Harry savored the time, let it pass, and woke in a sort of half-doze to find Draco trying to stir beneath him. He sat back and up, pleased with himself, that he had the weight and the strength to make it difficult for Draco to rise without moving him, pleased with the ache in his arse, pleased with everything.  
  
Draco reached for him and looped an arm around his neck, not trying to press him back down into a kiss, just holding him there and making him _be._ Harry met his eyes, smiling, and Draco whispered to him, “That was incredible. How did you—”   
  
His eyes were drowning, a mixture of black and grey and blue that Harry had never known he would find so fascinating, because he had never seen it before. He took Draco’s chin in his hand and kissed him in a soft, leisurely way, before he grinned and said, “It’s not like I could have done it without your help.”  
  
“You were incredible,” Draco whispered back, voice so drunk that Harry had the strong feeling that he hadn’t actually heard Harry.   
  
“So were you,” Harry said.  
  
“We _both_ were,” Draco said, a sentiment that Harry could agree with, and Harry laughed and bit his chin.  
  
They wrestled on the floor for a few minutes, Draco pretending that he wanted to stand and Harry pretending that he wanted to keep him down. Then they sprawled there, one of Harry’s hands dangling off to the side, the rest of him cradled. Draco at last sighed and said, “Will you stay the night?”  
  
Harry thought about it. Then he said, “The wards on the Manor are as safe as the ones on my house, I take it?”  
  
“Safer, I think,” Draco said. “Just because they’re older and bigger and have more back-up defenses.” His hand smoothed up and down Harry’s back for a minute, then locked in the middle, between the shoulder blades. “Do you really think I would let _anything_ happen to you? Really? You can think so poorly of me?”  
  
“Things might happen that you can’t help,” Harry said, thinking of the people who had hit his wards with enormous blasts of raw power until they simply broke, a trick that not even Hermione could think up a counter to. Those people worked in teams, and when one of them got too tired to continue, the other would take over.  
  
“You’re shivering,” Draco said, frowning at him as if it was his fault. “That settles it. You’re not going home to that cold house of yours.”  
  
Harry snarled at him. “ _Cold_? Says the man who spent the majority of his time there under blankets _and_ Warming Charms—”  
  
Draco’s hands just grew stronger. “Harry,” he whispered, not a plea, not a prayer, but closer to them than Harry had ever heard anything _not_ them be. “Stay with me. Please.”  
  
And Harry gave in to both their desires, and kissed him again.


	12. Nadir

  
Harry woke abruptly, the way he tended to on most mornings when he hadn’t slept behind his own wards. He lay still, partially because of the unfamiliarity of the room and partially because of the arm across his waist pinning him to the bed, turning his head so that he could take in the sights around him.  
  
This particular bedroom—from the rows of doors they had passed last night, Draco hadn’t been lying about the number of them in the Manor—was decorated in a mixture of pale greens and some yellows that Harry had expected to find nauseating. It was pleasant in the sunlight, though, and so was the breeze from the large open window. Harry sniffed, and caught a hint of roses, dirt, and sharper things. This bedroom must look out over the gardens.  
  
The fireplace’s mantle was white marble, of course; Harry should have known it was never going to be anything else. It was unmarked, unstained, by any vein of color, but he could see a few delicate boxes sitting near the edge. They looked like lacquered wood, the colors of jade and gold and ebony. Harry wanted to get up and run his fingers along their smooth sides.  
  
The fireplace grate was a single pane of glass, depicting curling ocean waves with racing clouds above them. Harry wondered who had chosen that, if it represented Draco’s good taste or his mother’s or a throwaway contribution to decorating this room for guests.  
  
The bed was so huge that Harry had actually needed the help of the footstool Draco had lent him to get inside it. It had curtains along only one side, for some reason, the one nearest the door, as if Draco wanted to keep himself from hearing the house-elves passing up and down the corridor. There was sheer openness on the other side, with the carpet somewhere down there, past the froth of lace and cloth. Harry rolled to the side, wondering if he would be able to see it and determine what color it was. He didn’t think he’d noticed last night.  
  
The arm across his waist halted him, and then Draco rolled into the dent in the bed he’d made and murmured in his ear, “Good morning.”  
  
Harry turned his head to capture Draco’s mouth, and Draco allowed it with scarcely a murmur. His fingers smoothed up and through Harry’s hair, down his sides to his ribs, and paused for a moment before sinking into the soft skin there.  
  
Harry smiled into the kiss. “Not ticklish, sorry,” he said, and ran a hand into Draco’s own hair. It looked a natural, tangled mess, and Harry tugged on it hard, pulling his hand back only when he heard Draco’s curse and fluttering his eyelashes at him. “I like it.”  
  
“You would,” Draco said, lying there with his eyes half-lidded and his smile so satisfied that Harry was tempted to fuck him again so he would lose that look. “You like naturally chaotic things, I’ve already noticed.”  
  
“Does that fit in with all the other conclusions that you think you’ve drawn about me, or not?” Harry yawned, and stretched his arms over his head, towards the pillows. They were miracles of softness, so much so that Harry had found his head sinking into them until he almost suffocated and had actually rolled to the side so that he could rest on Draco’s shoulder. He had to have something solid to prop him up.  
  
 _How long since you’ve had that thought?_  
  
Harry shrugged irritably to himself. Yes, once his Auror job had been the foundation he thought he would build the rest of his life on, but that hadn’t worked out. He had his house and his friends and his convictions and, oh, everything else to build on now.  
  
 _And I don’t know how much of a place Draco can have in that, when he’s the only one I’m close to who doesn’t know the truth._  
  
Draco hadn’t answered his last question, Harry realized. He turned his head and found that Draco had risen on his side, although God knew where he got the purchase to do so in the enormously soft bed, and was staring down at him with pensive eyes.  
  
“I know that you’re chaotic,” Draco said, as if talking to someone who wasn’t in the bed right beside him, and watching him with a fairly critical eye. “I know that you were probably in Gryffindor. I know you got in trouble with the Ministry, and felt that you had to cast a spell that erased my memory in order to hide.” He stared harder.  
  
“Not just your memories,” Harry said, rolling his eyes and wondering if the sex had been good enough to change Draco’s opinion of him. “Everyone’s.”  
  
“Mine is still the most important,” Draco said. “And you claim that you hated my father, and my wand reacts to you.” He looked over at the table where Harry had laid his wand and glasses when they had finally fallen into the bed to sleep, and reached out a hand. Harry watched him in some amusement. Draco had already touched the holly wand when he dangled Harry over the edge of his broom. If it hadn’t reacted to him then, then it seemed unlikely that it would right now.  
  
Draco picked up the wand and made a few passes through the air with it, then shook his head and gave it to Harry. Harry used it to clean up his morning breath and heal some of the aches and twinges coming from his arse, then ran his hand down Draco’s back and healed a few of the scrapes he’d left there.  
  
Draco shivered under the influence of the magic, not taking his eyes away from Harry’s face. “You took mine,” he said. “You used it. But it seems that I never made your wand obey me. I wonder why not? That’s the kind of confrontation I would have demanded an equal share of.”  
  
“I don’t know,” Harry said, cocking his head to the side and feigning confusion that he hoped Draco would find adorable. “That seems to be the kind of thing that you would repay as soon as you could, you’re right.”  
  
“Don’t do that, please.” Draco’s eyelids flicked shut and then opened again. He was staring intently at Harry and speaking in a voice so low that Harry had to concentrate to hear the individual words.  
  
“Don’t do what?” Harry asked.  
  
“Don’t act as though you’re puzzled when I know you’re not,” Draco said quietly. “I know that you realize the truth, and probably—you think it’s funny to watch me grope after it.” His face began to turn red. “But you can at least act decent and not as though you share my confusion.”  
  
Harry nodded and gripped Draco’s wrist for a moment. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”  
  
Draco’s face froze in the middle of a smile. “I don’t think I’ve heard you say that before,” he whispered. “Or not often. Is that another clue?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Harry said, forcing himself to lean back on the pillow and idly spin his wand instead of pointing it at Draco. “I reckon it could be. I don’t know what’s going through your head right now, how advanced you are at figuring out who I am.”  
  
“I want to know,” Draco said, and rose to his hands and knees so smoothly that Harry spent a moment blinking until he realized that Draco was leaning over him, his hands locked on Harry’s shoulders, his leg sliding in between Harry’s thighs. Harry shut his eyes and thought about objecting that the way Draco was handling his questioning really wasn’t fair, but then Draco’s leg began to rub and he abandoned the questions for moaning instead. Draco stroked his jaw, leaned down to kiss him, and then went on as though nothing had happened to interrupt him. “If you would just tell me, it would be easier.”  
  
“I couldn’t,” Harry said, wrestling back control of himself and opening his eyes. “It wouldn’t do any good. The spell wouldn’t let you accept anything I said that contradicted what you already believe.”  
  
“How…interesting,” Draco said, and bit Harry’s chin hard enough that he knew it wasn’t intended as a love bite. He pulled back and sat up, or tried. Draco was still on top of him, and came with him, smiling at him with savage eyes. “And it doesn’t matter to you what I want? It doesn’t matter to you what I ask for?”  
  
“Yes, it matters,” Harry said, too far gone to lie, and let his eyes slip shut. He was thinking: _Perhaps this is the best way. If Draco doesn’t like me, really doesn’t like me, then I don’t have to worry about him breaking the spell._  
  
“Then tell me.” Draco’s hands were gentle on him, and firm at the same time.  
  
Harry shook his head, listening to the rustle of his hair on the pillow and the gasps that came through his parted lips as if they were made by another person.  
  
“Can’t, won’t, what?” Draco’s grip tightened, ran over him, song-quick and breeze-light. “Harry.”  
  
Harry sighed, and turned his head. It looked as if he wasn’t going to get out of this, and that meant that he had to say something. It was impossible to leave Draco wanting, even if it would be better, even if he thought that sooner or later it was going to happen anyway. He was incapable of making it happen of his own free will.  
  
“The spell prevents me,” he whispered. “And because I’m afraid that you would abandon me the moment you found out who I was.”  
  
Draco made a growling sound that warned Harry a moment before Draco flipped him over and leaned on him, his hands bracing themselves on Harry’s naked hips as if he wanted to rip the skin off. “We’ve been over that. I have to know. I want to know. And I have no intention of ever letting you go.” He kissed Harry in the middle of the back, as if he thought gentleness might persuade Harry to tell him where force wouldn’t.  
  
Harry sighed and stretched under the kiss, and then reached back and took the back of Draco’s neck in his hand, not trying to draw him forwards, just feeling and keeping him there.  
  
“Harry,” Draco whispered again, and bent down long enough to apply his teeth where his lips had been, sucking, drawing, making Harry writhe in lazy urgency under his tongue.  
  
“Keep doing that, and I might just keep you there and doing that,” Harry muttered, arching his neck back and feeling Draco’s teeth scrape down just to the right of his spine. “Not tell the truth. Your teeth.”  
  
“They _are_ rather good, aren’t they?” Draco said, in a voice that wound all around Harry’s body and tightened and tensed his muscles at once, and then Draco’s hand was on his spine, his shoulder blade, rubbing up and around. “Harry. Please.”  
  
Harry shuddered a little at the last word. He was sure that it was one Draco didn’t use often. He rolled over, and Draco let him do it, his eyes eager on Harry’s face. He could feel them long before he faced Draco.  
  
When they were face-to-face again, Draco kissed him, so that any confession Harry might have _wanted_ to make was drowned by teeth and tongue and lips. Then he let the kiss go and sprawled across Harry’s stomach and legs, his own legs kicking up towards the end of the bed, his face shining.  
  
Harry swallowed. The sight made him want to get up and flee, and not because he was afraid of the damage Draco could do if he punched Harry with all the force of that lithe body behind the gesture. He didn’t want to damage that expression on Draco’s face. It really didn’t matter what kind of damage he took himself.  
  
But Draco was there, and he deserved an answer. Harry reached out and cradled Draco’s face between his hands, running his fingers up and down his cheeks. Draco closed his eyes and turned his head to the side so that he could kiss Harry’s palms.  
  
“If I could tell anyone, it would be you,” Harry whispered. “You mean more to me than anyone except my friends has since I put up the spell. I’ve dated people, and made friends, and talked to them about my hobbies, but you’re the only one I’ve shared something this deep with.”  
  
Draco’s eyes fluttered open, and he looked at Harry in a way that made Harry have to look down.  
  
“But besides the spell,” Harry whispered, “there’s the fact that I’m fucking selfish, and want to enjoy you being with me for a little while. I can’t enjoy that if I have to worry about what you’ll do when you find out. I want—will you let it go for right now, Draco? If you figure it out on your own, that’s fine, but I don’t want you to ask me anymore.”  
  
Draco pulled away from him, as Harry had feared and thought would happen, and moved restlessly, on his hands and knees, towards the end of the bed, shaking his head all the while. “ _God_ ,” he muttered. “You sound as frightened as a little boy. Maybe I was wrong about you being in Gryffindor.”  
  
“Draco—” Harry tried to say.  
  
Draco pulled himself haughtily up at the far end of the bed, which put more distance between them than Harry would have liked, just due to the sheer size of the bed, and glared at him. “I _like_ you, you wanker,” he snapped. “I see the man who took care of me, and the man I had the most incredible sex with last night, and the man who got away from me when I took his wand and his broom. And I can’t reconcile it with someone who’s asking me to give up the one thing I want to know most.”  
  
“Draco,” Harry said again. He was uneasy. He could feel a tightening sensation in his spine, and he wondered if he was getting close to the point where he would try to tell Draco himself, spell or no spell.  
  
“Fuck _off_.” Draco gave his head an irritated motion that was neither nod nor jerk, as though he had started out with one and then couldn’t get it to change into what he wanted. “Merlin, not even the Boy-Who-Lived tried to make decisions for other people like this—”  
  
His voice vanished. His smile vanished. He stared at Harry with falling eyes.  
  
Harry felt the tension in his spine snap. It was a fragile thing, a string that unraveled and plucked him on the head as though unleashed from a harp, but he felt all the muscles in his body pull taut.  
  
Draco stared at him.  
  
The falling eyes became knowing ones.  
  
Harry looked down.  
  
And Draco _moved._  
  
“You,” he was saying, something of the way he had said it last night in there, and something of horror, and something that made Harry tense and begin counting down in his head. Draco had stretched his arm out to the side and his hand was on the hawthorn wand, but his gaze was still on Harry, devouring. “You—I saw the scar, but it was so faint, and then I thought— _you_.”   
  
He cast the curse nonverbally, so that the first thing Harry knew about it was the long beam of yellow light streaking towards him.  
  
But Harry had his Auror training, and he had his anticipation of what would happen when this happened, in a way that Draco never could have. He flipped himself forwards and off the bed, bracing for the landing jolt, and the curse hit Draco’s headboard and started a fire. Harry flattened his belly to the floor and scooted under the bed, Summoning his wand with a flick of his head, and then casting the Summoning Charm that would reach for his clothes. He could Apparate naked if he had to, but—  
  
The bed above him started to cave in. Harry raised a Shield Charm above his head and scuttled under the protection of its dome to the edge.  
  
There, Draco’s hawthorn wand thrust into the curve of his throat. Harry looked up along the wand to the edge of it, and Draco’s face, and the knowledge that was cut there like a wound.  
  
“How could you,” Draco said, not enough breath behind it to make it a question. Harry wouldn’t pretend not to know what he meant, but at the same time, there were too many things there for him to grasp them all.  
  
Instead, he held Draco’s gaze and said words that he hoped would make more sense later, when Draco wasn’t in the mood to kill him instead of listen. “I’m sorry.”  
  
Draco shook his head, refusing the apology. He was white to the lips, and he began to chant as Harry watched, his wand weaving back and forth, his head half-lowered and the words tripping out of his mouth.  
  
Harry recognized the spell. It would turn him to stone, and then Draco could stick him in the corner of one room and do whatever he wanted to him later. It was easily reversible for the caster, but no one else would ever know what had become of Harry. Draco would have full control, and could lie to Harry’s friends if they came by, and with the Manor’s wards no one would be able to break in—  
  
“ _Confringo_ ,” Harry said flatly.  
  
The bed shattered, and the burning headboard behind Draco, and the wall behind that. Draco cursed and flung himself sideways, ruining his spell. Harry rolled over, and found his clothes coming to him. He yanked the shirt over his head and pulled on the trousers. He would worry about the pants later.  
  
He looked back, because he must, to see Draco rising to his feet, one hand on his cheek where a flying piece of wood must have struck him. Harry met his gaze and just waited, his throat so full of his heartbeat that he couldn’t have spoken even if he’d tried.  
  
“Why?” Draco whispered.  
  
“Because you were trying to control me,” Harry said. “ _No_.”  
  
“I hate you,” Draco said.  
  
Harry just nodded and then backed up a step when he noticed the wand coming around by Draco’s hip. “Lift the wards,” he said.  
  
“Or what?” Draco lowered his head and moved a half-step forwards.  
  
Harry raised his wand and struck out as hard and as fast as he could. The Manor’s wards ripped above him, stone parting, and then ancient magic, and then newer magic, and then the newest and most fragile spells of all, and Harry knew the backlash would hit him in a moment and double him over.  
  
But he Apparated before that could happen, and the racking pains seized him beside his own hearth, and he rolled over on the carpet and vomited into his own basin that stood ready in the corner of the room. Backlash like this had happened before.  
  
That done, he closed his eyes and leaned his head on the carpet. He was shaking, but he was whole, and what had happened was no more than what he had expected.  
  
But it was done with, and while he was sorry to hurt Draco—  
  
Now Draco knew.


	13. Vengeance

  
Harry had done what he should have long ago and explained to his friends that Draco wasn’t going to be visiting again, that he wasn’t permitted through the wards, and that he wouldn’t be owling him. He had made a special firecall to George, because he knew that he might lend his owl to Draco again otherwise.  
  
Which meant it made next to no sense when Draco’s Howler, delivered by Perseus, woke Harry from a sound sleep at four the next morning.  
  
 _“You ARESHOLE._ ”  
  
Harry shook his head and carefully pried himself away from the corner that he’d automatically leaped into when he woke up. No, he was all right, and no one was trying to sneak up on him. It was just the Howler, hovering in front of the bed and pivoting to face him as he moved—if a smoking red envelope could be said to have a face. Harry lowered his clenched fists and glared at the thing. It hung there in the air for a moment before it said more, and Harry got the distinct impression of an air of smugness.  
  
“Now that that’s out of the way,” the Howler said, in the neutral and faux-pleasant tone that Harry had heard Draco use before this only for making comments designed to get him to reveal his secrets. “I find it tiresome when someone else waits to announce his point, don’t you? Well, this point is clear and bright and on topic. You’re an arsehole, yes, but you’re more than that. You’re the enemy who stole the memory of his deeds from my mind and then greeted me as a friend. You’re the man who fucked me without letting me know that you were someone I hated.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes and folded his arms. “And who was the bastard who didn’t take no for an answer?” he muttered. “Oh, Harry, it will be fun. Oh, Harry, I could never let you go.”  
  
The Howler continued, and Harry wondered if it was a coincidence that the length of its pause had been the length of Harry’s words, or if Draco knew him scarily well. Or even had a spell on the letter that would transmit Harry’s words to him. Harry wouldn’t put it past him, although he’d never heard of anyone else enchanting a Howler like that. “I told you secrets, right from the beginning. True, I never meant to reveal that I was an Unspeakable, but you figured it out and I didn’t take the memory from you. Or the memory of where I was hiding in the safehouse, or the memory of the mirror—which _is_ a much more dangerous artifact than it appeared to be, by the way, I don’t want you making light of it.”  
  
“You crashed into my wards and involved me in your life unless I wanted to see you bleed to death on my threshold,” Harry reminded him. “And you were the one who sent me to retrieve the mirror. If it was so bloody dangerous, then you certainly didn’t exempt me from the danger.”  
  
“You can’t stand there and pretend that you didn’t know what you were doing,” the Howler snapped, shaking with the force of Draco’s agitation. “You can’t _get away_ with this. You’re the Boy-Who-Lived. You can’t _escape_ that. You can’t escape me.”  
  
Harry blinked. For a moment, he wondered if the words he had quoted a minute ago were true, and this was Draco’s way of hunting him down and keeping him close after all.  
  
Then he scowled. No. Of course not. Draco had his pride to avenge. He wasn’t about to let Harry off from paying for that insult, but it had nothing to do with wanting Harry there so he could get along with him and be with him. Or he wouldn’t have sent a Howler at four in the morning.  
  
“Tell me why you did it,” Draco said, and his voice had gone steady and quiet in a way that Harry had rarely heard from any Howler. Of course, he got the most of those from Ron complaining about the way Harry had “made” him stay with the Aurors after Harry quit, and Ron didn’t do steady and quiet much. “I want to hear from you in five minutes, or I’m sending another of these things. And more.”  
  
“Wanker,” Harry told Perseus as the letter blew itself apart. “Even if I wrote one in return, it couldn’t get to him in five minutes.”  
  
 _Unless he left his Floo connection open…_  
  
Perseus abruptly fluttered into the air. Harry cast a gentle version of a Binding Charm that functioned as an invisible tether between him and the perch. Perseus gave a squeak as he was pulled back down, and stared at Harry with his break slightly open. Apparently Harry had bad manners.   
  
“Yes,” Harry muttered, unrepentant. “I _do_ think that you would bring me another letter from him, and that you were probably getting ready to return to him, not George. That means you stay here until tomorrow. If he’s that impolite, he can wait on me. And what explanation does he think I’m going to give, anyway? I told him from the beginning that the spell wasn’t personal, that everyone suffered from it.”  
  
Perseus began to hoot in distress. Harry cast a Silencing Charm around the perch, scribbled a note to George that he Apparated to the shop to slide under the door—because, unlike _some_ people, he wouldn’t wake his friends in the middle of the night for anything under an emergency—and then went back to sleep.  
  
Perseus was still hammering angrily with his beak on invisible air when Harry’s eyes slid shut.  
  
*  
  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate.”  
  
For a moment, Harry considered the idea that George’s solemn expression hid no more than the truth. After all, if Draco had made friends with Perseus somehow, then he could have tempted the little owl to come to him with treats, and George might not have known anything about Draco using him to deliver the Howler.  
  
But they’d been friends too long, and Harry saw George’s guilty eye-twitch.  
  
“Yes, you do,” he said wearily. “You lent Draco your owl to bring his stupid fucking message. Look, can that just not happen again? I know that he can be convincing—” _even without his tongue up your arse,_ he started to say, but his friends already knew more about his recent mistakes than he was comfortable with “—but it’s over, and I’m not going to talk to someone who tried to turn me to stone.”  
  
“I think you need someone,” George said evenly.  
  
“Someone who wants me to be a statue in his house for the rest of his life,” Harry said, and turned his head almost upside-down. “No, I’m still not seeing your point-of-view.”  
  
George sighed hard enough to make angels weep—sometimes Harry had an unexpected surge of sympathy for Mrs. Weasley—and leaned forwards on his side of the hearth. “Look. I know that you spend a lot of time with me and Ron and Hermione, but you’ve isolated yourself too much since you cast that spell.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes hard enough that he winced a moment later. “As if I wasn’t isolated before that? People only _thought_ they knew me. It wasn’t like I had a crowd of friends that I gave up on to have my privacy instead.”  
  
George showed him the kind of teeth-grinding grin he’d used to get through Fred’s funeral. “And Malfoy must know you pretty well, if he broke through the spell after being with you such a short time.”  
  
Harry shuddered. That was the part he was trying not to think about, just like he’d tried to avoid thinking about the pauses the Howler left in its scolding of him last night. For Draco Malfoy to have stepped inside the inner circle that Harry had intended to keep closed except for his friends from now on…  
  
“He did that because he was persistent, and because I was an idiot and slept with him,” Harry said, with a tooth-grinding grin of his own. “Look, George, it just isn’t that _important._ Can we _please_ keep to what’s important? Namely, in this case, that he might tell everyone where I am, and that you keep lending him your owl.”  
  
“Perseus isn’t going to want to come near you for a while after this,” George said. “But you _have_ to communicate with him somehow, Harry. Your face when you told me…you have to. I haven’t seen you look like that in, well, ever.”  
  
Harry sighed and ran a hand down the side of his face. “And if I hadn’t been _mortal fucking enemies_ with him before this happened, we might have a chance. But when his first reaction was to try to light me on fire, well, that says a lot about the true state of things between us, don’t you agree?”  
  
George scoffed.  
  
“Come _on_ ,” Harry said. “I’d like for things to work out with him, but I also don’t want to be jerked around by someone who likes his pride more than me.”  
  
“You’ve hardly given him a chance to feel otherwise, since he knew who you really were,” George said smoothly. “And I think it’s a bloody unique chance, myself. Someone who’s never going to act like a crazed fan, someone who you don’t have to feel guilty about sleeping with because he’s not under that bloody spell, someone you already like. Where else are you going to find all those traits at once?”  
  
“I think I can find them in someone who’s not also trying to kill me,” Harry said. “Or cage me, or keep me locked up. Come on, George,” he added impatiently, when he saw George draw in his breath to say something else. “Are you _honestly_ arguing for Malfoy as my best choice under those circumstances?”  
  
George sighed a little, and some of the fire seemed to drain out of him. “Not in those circumstances,” he admitted. “But if you wanted to pursue something with him, I don’t think you should let the past stop you.”  
  
“It’s not that so much as the present,” Harry said, and then sighed. “Although part of me does think that I’m insane for letting someone into my life in the first place who I knew was going to react badly to the spell, and someone I used to hate, I still like him. I still want him.”  
  
“So it really is the way he’s acting right now,” George said, studying him with his chin in one hand.  
  
Harry paused, then said, “George, you’d better not repeat this conversation to him.”  
  
“Did I say I was going to do that?” George clasped a hand to his chest and looked around in search of an invisible audience. “When did I say I was going to do that?”  
  
“I don’t want to block Perseus out of the wards,” Harry said, “but I will if I have to.”  
  
“But will you open your Floo to Malfoy or go to meet him any other way?” George asked.  
  
Harry glared. “No.”  
  
“Then how are you going to pursue him, the way you say you want to?” George held out his hands. “Letters are probably the safest way for you to communicate right now. A Howler might hurt your feelings, but it wouldn’t actually _hurt_ you.”  
  
“Maybe,” Harry muttered, thinking of the way that the Howler had seemed to have weird enchantments on it, and the way that Draco was an Unspeakable. He glared again when George opened his mouth to speak. “Let me think about it, okay? I know that I like him, but not if he’s going to keep trying to kill me. I had enough of that with _other_ people who were convinced that they were doing it for the best of reasons.”  
  
George winced, perhaps remembering some of the fans who had honestly tried to kill Harry, and thought they were doing it to spare him pain or something. “Right. Sorry, mate.”  
  
“It’s fine.” Harry sighed gustily and leaned back. “I really will think about it. But a Howler in the middle of the night isn’t the best way to get me to do that. If you _do_ talk to Malfoy, you might tell him that.”  
  
George nodded again, and then vanished from the Floo. Harry sat brooding for a few minutes before he shook his head and stood. Brooding wouldn’t get the flowers tended to.  
  
*  
  
“Potter.”  
  
Harry turned around slowly, his arms full of the shopping. A moment ago, he had been worried about whether the Freezing Charms on his ice cream would really last against the unexpectedly strong sun beating down from overhead. Now he had to worry about shattering everything so he could get his hands free and down to his wand.  
  
Already his instincts were sharpening, considering the people around him, the places, the way that things altered from moment to moment as people passed through Diagon Alley with their children, and the way he would have to take to dodge Malfoy’s curses and yet make sure that he didn’t hit anyone else.  
  
Draco took a step towards him. He’d been leaning against the front of Madam Malkin’s, as though he wanted to watch the passersby, but he moved with the eagerness of a hound now, and Harry could see his hand on the hawthorn wand.   
  
“Potter,” Draco repeated softly. Except for being deeper, he said it exactly the way he would have at Hogwarts.  
  
Harry tightened his arms and his defenses. He had been right to think of Draco as Malfoy at first, he thought. This man didn’t look as though he wanted to talk. “Malfoy,” he said, in the tone emptied of expression he’d perfected when the _Daily Prophet_ wanted to interview him one too many times about someone proposing marriage to him.   
  
Then he waited. Draco had sought him out—and had George told him when Harry left? But no, it would be easier for him to have an alarm spell of some sort on the wards, and George hadn’t known Harry was going to Diagon Alley today—and so he would have to be the one to make the first move.  
  
A chilly smile touched Draco’s lips and he inclined his head. “As you will,” he said, although Harry wasn’t aware of choosing anything in particular. “You look as though you need help with the shopping. Shall I?”  
  
He didn’t move at all, and Harry realized that he was honestly trying to leave the choice up to him. That calmed Harry down a bit, and made him stop remembering all those times when he had to hold back to avoid hurting someone innocent but obsessed, and consider the situation that was in front of him.  
  
“I don’t want to invite you back to my house until I know that you won’t destroy it,” he said.  
  
“Why would I?” Draco was pale, although Harry didn’t remember seeing him turn that color. He just stood there, and his eyes were on Harry’s, and he looked as though Harry might blame him for a dozen things and not have any of them turn out to be the right one.  
  
“Because the things there matter to me,” Harry said. He was telling Draco nothing that he didn’t already know, so felt free to say it. “And I think you might destroy the things that matter to me out of revenge.”  
  
Draco paused, then shook his head. “Your house sheltered me,” he said. “Your gardens cheered me up. I wouldn’t hurt them. You, on the other hand…you did more than that to me.” His eyes were on Harry, hot as a predator’s.  
  
“Fine,” Harry said, and handed over the eggs and bread, so Draco had to juggle not to drop them. “So long as you understand that we’re going to meet somewhere near here, so we can _discuss_ things. And if you threaten anyone else trying to get to me, that’s the end of it.”  
  
“Understood,” Draco said, his mouth surprisingly relaxing. He cast a Levitation Charm on the eggs and looked at the rest of the shopping in Harry’s hands in silent condemnation. “Given your background, I can understand why you would fear someone coming after you with a wand in public. How many times did it happen?”  
  
Harry swallowed as he thought of the three deaths he had witnessed from crazed fans starting after him and hitting someone else in the way. “Too many,” he whispered. Those people had gone to Azkaban, luckily, but for the murders, and the Ministry had continued to do nothing else about people hunting Harry, and the _Daily Prophet_ had run stories that were sympathetic to them. There was a certain sense that the people deserved to have their hero, just not to kill others in pursuit of him.  
  
“Ah,” Draco said, and tried to take the rest of the shopping.  
  
Harry danced backwards. “I like carrying them,” he said, when Draco gestured with his wand at Harry’s wand. He left unspoken the thought that if he needed to bolt, at least he would have more of the food with him than he had given to Draco.  
  
From the way Draco looked at him, he understood that part of it, too, but chose not to contest it. “Where did you have in mind?”  
  
“Fortescue’s,” Harry said, and laughed despite himself at the look on Draco’s face. “You’re making me risk my ice cream melting, the least you can do is buy me more of it.”  
  
“Yes,” Draco said, and Harry caught a glimpse in his eyes of the pit of want and anger his words had fallen into, and found himself silent in the face of it. He was the one, in the end, to lead the way, and try to ignore the feeling of those burning eyes on his back.


	14. The Conversation to End All Conversations

  
“Talk.”  
  
Harry thought it was a bit rich for Draco to demand _that,_ especially since he hadn’t even had a chance to taste his ice cream yet. He retaliated by swirling the ice cream around on his tongue, letting it melt and half-closing his eyes as he felt the chocolate run down his throat. The chocolate hadn’t been melted on top of the ice cream, but that hardly mattered. The sunlight coming through the windows was still strong enough to make it start to melt the minute they sat down at the table.  
  
Or maybe that was the heat beating out from Draco, the heat of resentment and anger.  
  
Harry lowered his spoon and looked at Draco. “You were the one who wanted this conversation,” he said, sweet as the vanilla ice cream that Draco had bought under protest and which sat congealing in front of him. “Why don’t you start?”  
  
Draco reached across the table and caught his wrist. Harry allowed it, because it was his left hand, and that left his right hand free for both his spoon and the wand. “You have no idea what I wanted to do to you when I found out the truth,” Draco hissed.  
  
“Yes, I do.” Harry cast a Privacy Charm around their table, just strong enough to make people look away in lack of interest, although he suspected many wouldn’t be looking their way anyway. Out here, he was no one any of them knew. But Draco’s hair, and then his face, might attract attention, and trouble. “You tried to kill me. I think I know pretty well.”  
  
Draco blinked and didn’t crush Harry’s wrist the way he’d expected him to. “I did not mean to do that,” Draco murmured. “It was the first, instinctive reaction. It’s _been_ my instinctive reaction since the war—destroy anyone who witnessed me in a moment of weakness.”  
  
Harry smiled brightly at him and shook his head, clucking his tongue, and knew from Draco’s disgusted expression that he found that even _more_ disgusting when Harry had a mouth full of ice cream. Tough. Harry had lost all sympathy for people who tried to kill him since those months of constant murder attempts. “Well, it’s nice to know which words of yours I can trust and which I can’t.”  
  
“What do you mean?” Draco stared at him now with one muscle twitching above his eye. Harry wondered how many tics he could make him have before this conversation was all over.  
  
“All that bollocks about how you would never hurt me,” Harry said, and licked the back of his spoon, tilting his head back again so that the ice cream would cascade to the bottom of his throat. “I know that’s not true. Because what did you do five minutes after saying it? Try to burn me alive.”  
  
“I do find it rather strange that you would keep on harping on that,” Draco said, head half-lowering as though he thought he’d like to bite Harry. Harry tried to keep his face still and not remember the moments when Draco _had_. “It’s not as though you haven’t had people try to kill you before.”  
  
Suddenly he let Harry go completely but leaned forwards, so near that Harry could feel Draco’s breath on his cheeks. “You _fucker_ ,” Draco said, low but deadly. “How do you think I felt, when I realized how much of my life was gone? All my rivalries in school, all the times I fought you, the debts I owed you, the times I thought about you since the war, reduced to a faceless Boy-Who-Lived who never existed—”  
  
“You’re getting ice cream on your shirt,” Harry pointed out, nodding to where Draco’s chest had brushed the bowl of melting vanilla.  
  
Draco’s eyes shone, and his hands clawed around the sides of the table as though he would rip it apart. “You have _no idea_ what you meant to me,” he said. “And it all rushed back all at once, the enemy and the friend and the man I had slept with, the pleasure and the pain. I lashed out literally _without_ meaning to, because those memories happened to be uppermost at the time and it was the only thing I could think of to do.”  
  
Harry snorted quietly. He could actually accept that explanation, if he thought about it. The spell had broken for no one else, and so he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to suddenly have such a huge portion of your memory restored to you, the way it would flood your mind.  
  
 _And few of the people who might break through the spell would have had as much to do with you as Draco did._  
  
So, yeah, that much might be true. But that didn’t mean that he wanted to stay with someone who would try to kill him, or try to control him. Some of the people who had stalked him and broken into his home had honest grief or mental problems, too. They still belonged far away from him.  
  
He looked up to find Draco hadn’t moved, even though by now he must be able to feel the ice cream soaking into his groin. “Tell me that you’ll give me time to think through this,” Draco said. It sounded like a demand and not the plea that he might have meant it to come out as, but then, Harry wasn’t convinced that Draco _did_ pleas. “Tell me that you’ll talk to me, stay in my life.”  
  
“I can’t promise that,” Harry said. “And it’s not even so much the hexes, you know, as the spell to turn me to stone.”  
  
“Why that one?” Draco still stared at him, and Privacy Charm or not, a few people were starting to look their way. Harry grimaced. Draco looked as if he wanted to bite his face off or snog him in the middle of the restaurant.  
  
But this was still the best place for a meeting. Malfoy Manor would give Draco too much advantage of home ground, and Harry was not inviting him back to his beloved home, not without more assurances than he had right now.  
  
“Because other people wanted me under control,” Harry said, and didn’t become aware that his voice was shaking until he heard himself speak. Well, he had very little to hide from Draco now. He might as well know this, too. “I saw the cages some of them built in their cellars, Draco. I saw the _boxes_ that someone intended to cut me up and put me in. Or the jars for my major organs, from someone who followed Egyptian beliefs. I can face danger. I collapsed vomiting from the backlash of breaking your wards when I got home, not because I was frightened. But to _control_ me? You can fuck right off.”  
  
He positioned the spoon like a weapon, and met Draco’s eyes, and tried to ignore the sound of his own panting.  
  
Draco continued to stare at him. Then he sat back, with a little frown and a shake of his head.  
  
“Why didn’t I ever know it was that bad?” he whispered.  
  
“Because your memories are changed from being under the spell,” Harry said, although he blinked as he said it. Surely someone as smart as Draco was could figure that out. “And the Ministry never reported on some of the details that made them look bad. Or the papers didn’t. Either the Ministry cautioned them not to or they didn’t think they would make interesting stories, I never found out which.”  
  
Draco continued to stare at him. “But there must have been something you could do. Someone must have wanted the money that you would pay to ensure your privacy.”  
  
“I couldn’t offer as much money as the people who would pay for access to that information.” Harry shook his head. “The second year I was in Auror training, the security firm I’d paid to put up my wards sold the specifics, and someone nearly strangled me when I walked in my front door. After that, I handled everything.”  
  
“I would have heard _something_ ,” Draco said. “And I was watching the papers. I remember that much. I paid attention to the Boy-Who—to _you_ , it was _you_ then. I would have heard stories like that.”  
  
Harry snorted. “Well, it’s easier to walk away from you if you don’t believe me, that’s for certain. A lack of trust is something I’m not going to tolerate in someone I take to my bed.”  
  
Draco flushed. “Tell me why I didn’t hear anything.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “I just did. The Ministry was filled with people who didn’t like me, or didn’t think it was that bad, or were fans themselves. And I’m still an ordinary wizard, no matter how skilled and famous. I couldn’t guard against _everything,_ and the only way that I could have made the paper stop writing about me involved methods that I wasn’t comfortable with.”  
  
“But you were comfortable with mind control of the entire wizarding world?” Draco was staring at him with his face fixed.  
  
Harry couldn’t help it; he started laughing. Draco reached out again as if he would capture and crush Harry’s wrist after all, but stopped. Harry leaned back in his chair and hooted, his throat aching and his eyes running with tears.  
  
Draco continued to stare at Harry with his arms folded and his brows lowered until Harry thought he could fairly accuse him of pouting. Harry cleared his throat with a hiccough, and said, “You don’t care about the rest of the wizarding world, Draco. You’re pissed because of what I did to _you_. Not anyone else.”  
  
Draco blinked, and then smiled faintly. “But it leaves the question of what you wouldn’t do to the newspapers.”  
  
Harry shrugged. “I could have offered them an exclusive interview to back off for a while, but then they would have wanted another one, and another one. I could only make them give me a bit of privacy by becoming what they wanted me to become, which I wasn’t willing to do. So I fought back another way.”  
  
“Will you continue to fight with me?”  
  
Harry waited a moment, until he was sure that his laughter was entirely gone, and caught Draco’s eyes. “If you betray me and reveal the location of my home, or the existence of my spell, or anything else, I’ll hunt you down and destroy you.”  
  
Draco winced and half-raised a hand. “I—didn’t mean it that way.”  
  
Harry stared at him for a few minutes longer, and at last decided that Draco really meant it. He grunted and nodded, leaning back and beginning to eat his chocolate ice cream again. At least most people had gone back to their own meals now; they seemed to have decided that the situation couldn’t be serious if they weren’t about to see flying noses and snapping teeth. “Fine. And yes, I’ll fight with you if try to kill me or control me. Which is probably the best argument for you walking away right now. You can’t keep yourself from wanting those two things.”  
  
Draco stared down at his own vanilla, and finally waved his wand to cast a Cleaning Charm. He cast Harry a keen glance, which meant he had noticed the way that Harry jumped when he drew his wand. Harry met his eyes and simply shrugged back. In an odd way, it was freeing that Draco now knew so much about him. Harry didn’t need to explain his reflexes the way he sometimes had to to the Muggles he’d dated.  
  
“I was shocked,” Draco said quietly. “I was angry. To realize what you had been, who you’d been to me, and what you were now—” He shook his head. “Some of it was the memories’ sudden return, but some of it was that I couldn’t conceive of why you would have done it, except as some kind of grand joke on me. And I thought you might play that joke once I gave in and slept with you, even if you hadn’t intended it at first.”  
  
“ _Gave in_?” Harry repeated incredulously. “Who was telling who about fucking and the number of his bedrooms, here?”  
  
Draco narrowed his eyes. “And now—I don’t like being vulnerable, Harry. I know that you took great steps to prevent yourself from being so to anyone who might possibly try to control you, so you ought to know what I mean. I lashed out, and I regret it now. I actually wanted to cast the spell to turn you into a statue so that I would have time to think about what to do next. I never meant it to be permanent.”  
  
Harry fluttered his eyelashes at Draco. “I bet you say that to all the people you try to turn into stone.”  
  
“Fuck you, then,” Draco snapped, but he didn’t stand or push his chair back from the table. “I’m trying to explain.”  
  
Harry held his eyes and shrugged a little. “I want you,” he said. “I like you. I might even be more in love with you than anyone I’ve dated since I cast the spell. But I won’t be a sacrifice to your wounded pride. Yours, or anyone else’s.”  
  
Draco cocked his head to the side. “I had thought that Gryffindors were willing to sacrifice everything for love,” he said.  
  
Harry snorted. “I didn’t say it was love, just that it might be, or could become that. And yeah, sacrifice is not something that I want to do. I want privacy instead.”  
  
Draco leaned further back in his chair. “And do you think that you can understand _my_ point-of-view? That no matter how much you tried to tell me about the spell, or warn me, nothing could be adequate warning for—that?”  
  
Harry cocked his head, and then sighed and rubbed his forehead, not because his scar hurt, but because he could feel a headache coming on. “Yes, I can see what you mean. But that doesn’t mean we belong together.”  
  
“I can’t claim now that I would never hurt you,” Draco said quietly. “That was a stupid claim to make, in retrospect, given that I have hurt others I loved. But the rest of it remains true. I want you. I don’t intend to let you go without a fight. I enjoyed the night we spent together, and it is _still_ incredible sex.” He stared at Harry again. “If I heard that you were with someone else, I would take it as a personal insult.”  
  
Harry laughed. “And that a Slytherin declaration of love, is it?”  
  
Draco smiled slightly, but his eyes had gone implacable. “I won’t answer that question until you answer mine. Are you with me, or against me?”  
  
“It doesn’t have to work that way,” Harry pointed out. _Bloody Slytherins, dividing the world up into two halves all the time._ “We can just walk away from each other and ignore each other’s existences again. That would mean that you don’t have to be with me _or_ against me. Just there.”  
  
Draco looked at him, and Harry winced a little at the look in his eyes. “Yes, right, so that option’s out,” he muttered.  
  
“With prejudice.” Draco leaned forwards. “And I don’t want to hear of you dating anyone else, either. I want to be with you.”  
  
“So you can decide if you want to love me or kill me?” Harry shook his head. “I told you, I don’t want anyone who—”  
  
“I would not seriously try to kill you.” Draco took up Harry’s hand and played with his fingers. “I didn’t mean the threats five seconds after you Apparated away. And you caused quite a bit of damage to the Manor with that stunt.”  
  
“Good,” Harry said.  
  
Draco smiled back at him, all his teeth bright and looking as if they had been newly filed that morning. “I want you,” he said, soft, savage, intense. “I want the man who defies me and the man who took my memory. I want the man you were, the one who conquered the Dark Lord, and the one you are now, who values his privacy. I look forward to making you surrender to me as completely as I did to you when you knew the truth and I didn’t.”  
  
Harry felt the breath catch in his throat, and then stop for a moment. When Draco put it like that, when he looked at Harry with that gleam in his eyes, when his fingers tightened on Harry’s hand the way they were doing now—  
  
And Harry remembered that words were words, and actions were something different altogether. He started breathing again.  
  
“You haven’t forgiven me for the spell yet,” he said.  
  
“No.” Draco was inflexible, watching. “But I want to know more. And that means I’ll soon know more about why the spell was cast, and how you did it, and what kind of person you are now, the parts I’m still missing.”  
  
Harry couldn’t help snarling, in spite of thinking that some of what Draco was saying was reasonable. “I don’t want to be _collected_ ,” he said. “I’m not a collector’s item.”  
  
Draco dipped his head, his eyes so intense that Harry wanted to shove his chair back and run away in turn. “I hope to find out ways of having you, wanting you, without making you feel that way,” he said quietly. He paused, then added, “And is there nothing that you want to know about me?”  
  
Harry held Draco’s eyes for a long moment. Then he said, “Weeell…I _am_ curious about how many bedrooms the Manor _really_ has.”  
  
Draco’s smile reached and burnished his eyes, and this time, when his grip closed down on Harry’s hand, it didn’t feel _as_ imprisoning. And it did still leave Harry one hand free to eat his ice cream.


	15. Such an Explanation

  
“I want to come back home with you.”  
  
Harry, who had turned around in the middle of the street to hold out his hand to Draco and bid him farewell, paused. Yes, all right, he should have anticipated that would be one of Draco’s desires, but he’d never thought that Draco would ask so openly right now. He could have patience when he wanted to, Harry knew that.  
  
Evidently, he didn’t want to now.   
  
Harry faced him. Draco was standing in the middle of the street outside Fortescue’s, Harry’s shopping floating behind him—he had scooped up all of it when he cast his Levitation Charm, and Harry didn’t see the point in a row—while he watched Harry. He might _look_ patient, from a distance, with the way his mouth had become a smile, but his teeth showed. And those eyes…  
  
“I don’t trust you that much yet,” Harry said.  
  
“I don’t want to betray you,” Draco said. “For the excellent reason that it would give more people the chance to have a piece of you, when I want all the pieces for myself.”  
  
Harry grimaced and shook his head. “That—I don’t enjoy that metaphor, I told you. Too many people wanting to chop me up into real pieces instead of metaphorical ones.”  
  
Draco blinked for a moment as though disconcerted that Harry might take it that way. Then he said, “Fine. I want to keep you to myself and have your attention, day and night, until this devouring _need_ for it ceases. And it won’t, not for a long time, not now that I know how fervently you cut me out of your life.” He met Harry’s eyes again. “That metaphor more to your taste, lover?”  
  
“You have a bit of ice cream on your chin,” Harry murmured in response, and when Draco reached up for it, he waited until his finger met dry skin. Draco’s eyes slid back to him and flared in response.  
  
“ _There_ ,” Harry said, stabbing out a finger so that Draco froze with the expression on his face. “ _That’s_ the reason I don’t want to invite you back. I might trust you not to tell anyone. I don’t trust you not to get angry at me and start trying to take my life apart in other ways.”  
  
“I keep thinking, when you walk away, that I’ll never see you again,” Draco said.  
  
Harry snorted. “This is only the second time that’s happened since you knew. And the first time, well, I believe we’ve been over my dislike of being a stone statue that you stick in a corner of the cellar somewhere.”  
  
Draco gave him a slightly feral smile. “It wouldn’t have been the cellars. My bedroom, so I could watch you and ponder whether feeling you under me again was worth the price of letting you out.”  
  
“I want the _option_ of walking away from you,” Harry said, lowering his voice further. “Because of that. Because of that desire to _possess_ me, which I didn’t think you had at first but your spells and your words prove you do. Plenty of people out there who wanted to own me. Doesn’t mean any of them can.”  
  
“I don’t want to own you in the same way.”  
  
“Really?” Harry raised his eyebrows in what someone else, seeing his face from the side, would take as polite disbelief, but Draco could see his eyes just the way that he’d been able to see Draco’s earlier, and this time, Draco’s smile was the one to vanish.  
  
“No,” he said, his voice thick for a moment, and then he closed his eyes and obviously tried to slow down, to stop, to think. Harry appreciated the effort, which would have a good effect on everything except his ice cream, but then, he’d had a replacement for that anyway. He watched Draco’s face, the soft lines of his cheeks he wanted to touch, the wand he wanted to blast out of his hand, and wondered if there was any compromise good enough to content both of them.  
  
“I told you why I reacted that way,” Draco said. “It wouldn’t happen again.”  
  
“Uh-huh,” Harry said. “And just now you implied that it would, because of how much you hate to see me walk away from you.”  
  
“It was a joke, Harry.” Draco reached out and let his fingers trail up and down Harry’s wrist. “You’re so…I wanted you to pay attention to me, I wanted you to do something that was less than perfect so I could win for once, and then I just wanted you. All these desires are mixed up inside me. I can’t promise that I’ll always talk about them in a way you’re comfortable with, or that don’t resemble the ways your fans talked about you.”   
  
Then his hand closed down, and Harry had to remind himself of the holly wand in his pocket and the way he had torn down the wards of the Manor before he could breathe again. Draco crowded close, breathing Harry’s air, taking the same space.  
  
“But I can promise,” Draco whispered against his ear, “that with me you’ll never need to fear anyone _else_ owning you, ever again.”  
  
“Good,” Harry whispered back, light-headed with something that was not exactly fear, not _exactly._ “But since I don’t intend to ever break the spell, you’re offering me a service I don’t _require._ ”  
  
Draco pulled back, and blinked at him. “You didn’t intend to _ever_ break the spell? I thought it was just a temporary measure to keep you safe. I…” He fell silent, frowning, and his grip on Harry’s wrist faltered a bit.  
  
“Of course not,” Harry said, but softened his voice a bit at the bewilderment he saw in Draco’s face. “Why would I? There’s no reason for me to do so. I like the life I have now, and no one important to me was left out of the spell.” That had been one of his fears, that they would find out when they cast the spell that someone who had pretended to know him really didn’t, but that hadn’t happened.  
  
“You should change things,” Draco said, and moved a step nearer again. Harry didn’t know what had made his eyes shine, what had fired him up from the inside, but he stood and awaited the next words. “If you came out of hiding, then you and I, together, could make sure that you were safe.”  
  
Harry grimaced. “But you couldn’t stop the photographs and the requests for interviews and the rumors and the stares,” he said. “I hated that just as much, before the end, as the more dangerous things. It implied that I wasn’t allowed to have _any_ life of my own, ever, and it meant that the people who wanted that kind of thing accepted that it was the regular state of things for me to flinch. That prepared them to accept the Ministry’s policy that I shouldn’t be helped or protected.”  
  
Draco stared at him some more. Then he said, “Granger helped you come up with that phrasing.”  
  
Harry folded his arms, and thus tore away Draco’s grasp on his wrist at last. “No,” he said, more coldly, and let his voice clang. “Sometimes I can come up with something on my own.”  
  
Draco winced, and ran a hand through his hair. “I didn’t mean to insult your intelligence, Harry,” he said.   
  
“It seems to me that you do a lot of things you don’t mean to.”  
  
“I’ve already apologized for some of it,” Draco said, watching him closely now. “That doesn’t mean I’ll continually apologize. I don’t want to.”  
  
Harry shrugged and looked around the street. No one was watching them closely yet, although with the mention of Hermione’s last name, he had been afraid of that. Part of the spell had transferred some of his excess fame to Hermione. “I don’t like talking about this in public.”  
  
“And you don’t want to invite me back to your house yet,” Draco said.  
  
Harry exhaled hard, more relieved than he cared to admit that Draco had accepted that prohibition. “No,” he said.  
  
“And you don’t want to come back to the Manor yet?” Draco spun his wand in his hand, and then looked down as if he had forgotten he held it. Well, maybe he had, Harry thought. Draco would have his own kind of scars and paranoia from the war, but that didn’t mean it would be the exact same kind as Harry’s.  
  
“No,” Harry said. “Thank you, but—no.” Then he hesitated, because he was thinking of the way that he had torn through the wards, and thinking he could do it again, and he also didn’t want to allow Draco to walk away with these words and nothing else between them. “Unless you were to let me tell my friends where I was going first, and leave your wards open a little bit so I could get out if I wanted to.”  
  
Draco stared at him. “The first surprises me that you think I would forbid that,” he said. “The second is impossible.”  
  
Harry gave him a hard little smile. “Then so is my visit. Sorry.”  
  
“No, you don’t understand,” Draco said. “I have enemies, as an Unspeakable, and more of them since I removed the mirror from its former owner. You wouldn’t lower your wards for an instant, or the armor this spell gives you, so I don’t see why I should have to.”  
  
Harry pictured himself going to the Manor without some sure way out. The panic and nausea that cramped his belly made the decision for him, and he bent over and closed his eyes, clutching his stomach for a moment, giving himself time to recover.  
  
“Are you all right?” Draco was staring at him as though he thought the ice cream had been poisoned; in fact, he turned and looked darkly over his shoulder at the window of Fortescue’s.  
  
“No, I’m all right,” Harry said, standing back up and shaking his head. “It was just a stupid reaction, anyway.”  
  
“It wasn’t,” Draco said, catching his eye in one of those bruising gazes that was so hard to look away from. “Nothing that makes that expression appear on your face is stupid. It was there when you were discussing the people who wanted to chop you up and put you in boxes. Explain.”  
  
 _A demand,_ Harry thought, licking his lips and regarding Draco for a moment. _He still thinks that he can order me around._  
  
But this didn’t feel the same way that Draco’s attempt to turn him to stone had. Well, of course it didn’t, that had been an incantation and this was simple words, but _still_. Draco had explained his reasoning.  
  
And the way he stood and looked at Harry made Harry wonder if there wasn’t more to the Slytherin declaration of love than he had thought there was.   
  
“All right,” he said. “I understand why you don’t want to lower your wards. Really. As you pointed out, I won’t do that myself, won’t even consider it.”  
  
Draco only nodded, and waited.  
  
“But I have to have a way to leave,” Harry said. “I don’t trust you well enough to get behind the Manor wards without it, not yet. Even if I tore them open again to escape—well, I don’t want to. That was hard on me, and it angered you. Both of those are things that I would like to avoid, if possible.” It sounded stiff and stupid when he explained it like that, but it was the truth, and Draco had said he wanted the truth. Within certain limits, Harry would do a lot to ensure that Draco got what he wanted.  
  
Draco only considered him, head on his side, and then nodded without smiling. “All right,” he said. “I think I can understand. I just—will you promise to talk to me again if you leave now?”  
  
Harry nodded. “I can’t hide behind the wards forever. I need food and clothes and ways to keep my mind busy, and that’s what I find in Diagon Alley.”  
  
Draco hesitated. Then he said, “But you would stay away if you thought I was endangering you.”  
  
Harry met his gaze without blinking. “Yes.”  
  
“All right,” Draco said, and surprised Harry by smiling wryly. He had thought Draco wasn’t really in a smiling mood. “I suppose it’s like the hawk I worked with one summer. I had to—to _trust_ that he would come back when he flew away from my wrist, because he could have left, and I couldn’t have prevented him. Even if he was trained, he’d been wild once, and he might decide to fly.” He looked straight at Harry.  
  
Harry smiled back at him. “The way that I have to trust that you won’t betray me,” he said softly. “Yes. Exactly like that.”  
  
“You could _Obliviate_ me,” Draco said, voice as soft as the murmur of flowing waters. “You’re easily powerful enough to do that, even with my Unspeakable training.”  
  
“I could do that,” Harry said, inclining his head modestly. “The way you could at least have tried to _Obliviate_ me when you knew that I knew the truth about your job. But you didn’t. And I didn’t. And we’re already in trust to each other, as vulnerable as it makes us.”  
  
“And you don’t want to take my memory of you away.”  
  
Draco’s eyes were as bright as wind. Harry smiled helplessly back. “No,” he said. “I wish that—I _could_ have wished that the way you discovered the spell was easier on both of us. But now that you’re with me, I don’t want to change things.”  
  
Draco reached for him, movements slow and obvious, and drew Harry’s hand to his lips. Then he stepped back, and said, “Why don’t you owl me?”   
  
It was another concession, and a marvelous one, an implicit promise that he wouldn’t turn to Perseus to reach Harry anymore, even though he could. Harry grinned back at Draco, feeling giddy and silly. So many times, during the past few years, he’d thought of all the things he was free to do now that he had his privacy back, and hated the thought of restraining himself from any desires. But now, it was nice to know that there was someone he was trusting, and something he was restraining himself from.  
  
Not because he couldn’t do it. Because he didn’t _want_ to.  
  
“I will,” he said. “Thanks.” He hoped that Draco wouldn’t ask about the last word, because he didn’t know if he could explain it.  
  
Draco nodded back exactly as though he knew what Harry was thinking, and then turned and walked away up the street. A few people gave him hostile glances, as though they recognized the face of a past Death Eater, but made way for him without trying to attack. No one looked twice at Harry.  
  
Harry weighed for a moment how wonderful it was that that was still true, and how he trusted Draco for it to keep being true, and then turned and walked away up the street in his own direction, to the next Apparition point.  
  
*  
  
George lifted a forkful of sausages from his plate and aimed them at Harry. “I _told_ you you needed someone in your life!”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes and reached out with his wand to heat the cooling tea in the cups back up. Neither of them had really touched the food while Harry was reciting his story, although of course he’d left some details out because they weren’t the kind that George needed to hear. “Yeah. Although I never thought it would be him.”  
  
“It’s the way things worked out.” George leaned back and sipped at his tea, enormously pleased with himself. “But I was right, wasn’t I?”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes again—he got a lot of practice at that with George around—and reached for his own plate. “Don’t get used to it, where Draco Malfoy is concerned,” he muttered. ”I think he has a lot of surprises in store for us all, and even some for himself.”  
  
But he knew one thing, one thing that thrilled and contented him all around and all through.  
  
He was _joyful._


	16. Dancing

  
Harry waited a day before he owled Draco. He thought that was a decent period, one that ought to allow Draco time to think over what he wanted and conceal Harry’s pathetic need to hear from him once again. And it _did_ feel pathetic, this boiling, taking-over need, at least for Harry. Draco had been the one to freely admit that he didn’t like watching Harry walk away from him. Harry was the one who had played the high-handed, house-proud, reluctant one.  
  
But he did send a letter off with Perseus and a friendly little note, asking Draco if he wanted to meet up in Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade or Ottery St. Catchpole to eat and talk, and mentioning that he missed him.  
  
Draco sent back an actual package, with papers inside that rustled and which made Harry open them curiously, expecting anything from recipes for Draco’s favorite food to pictures of stone statues he had around the grounds of the Manor that looked quite pretty, actually, and how Harry shouldn’t mind if he was one of them. But in reality, only the top parchment had handwriting on it, Draco’s, which said, _Ottery St. Catchpole sounds fine. We could be close to your friends there. What about Tuesday? And can you tell me if these are real?_  
  
Harry set the letter aside and turned to the rest of the package’s contents, which were clipped newspaper articles, some of them yellowing at the edges or showing slowly-moving photographs. The _Daily Prophet_ had never been printed to last.  
  
Harry paused and released his breath sharply when he realized what they were. Then he began to turn through them, slowly, like relics of another life.  
  
Yes. There was the first article on the break-ins, talking about how “youthful high spirits” had led some of Harry Potter’s “younger fans” to break his wards and flood into his house, where they were greeted with “an uplifted wand and uncomprehending snarls.” That was the _Prophet’s_ way of talking about parents who had come in using their children as shields, and then tried to ambush Harry with curses or binding spells when he was talking to them. The uplifted wand and the snarls had been to create protections for the children as well as himself.  
  
And there was the article on the first person who had murdered someone trying to get to him, Skeeter’s syrupy words skillfully implying sympathy for the victim and the murderer, driven mad by “insane longing for Harry Potter,” with not a word for Harry himself.  
  
Oh, and the interview with a tearful witch who had “ _only_ wanted a lock of the Chosen One’s hair for her dying daughter.” No mention of how she had tried to use the hair against Harry in a sympathetic magic spell, and failed only because Harry had had the foresight to cast enchantments on his hair that would burn it up when someone tried that.  
  
And the interview with the witch who had tried to cut his throat but “only needed some of his blood for a healing potion,” and the wizard who had wanted to cut Harry’s intestines out of his belly but should be “treated gently” because “the cult of celebrity around the Boy-Who-Lived dazzled him,” and the teenage witch who had claimed that Harry was the father of her child and tried to drain his Gringotts account, but, well, she had miscounted the days since her last period, that was all, she wasn’t _lying._  
  
Harry shook his head and shoved himself back from the table. He had to go work in the gardens for an hour before he could answer Draco, and then he sent back a terse letter acknowledging the idea for their meeting in Ottery St. Catchpole and adding a date and time, and one more paragraph.  
  
 _All of those things happened, but the paper’s perspective on it is…unique, to say the least. That’s not the way_ I _remember those things happening._  
  
Perseus came back remarkably fast, and Draco’s letter said only, _I understand. I’d like to hear about it. Two on Saturday sounds great. Do you want to invite any of the Weasleys?_  
  
*  
  
In the end, Ron and Hermione had agreed to come and drink and eat bad fish and chips with Harry and Draco in one of the small Muggle pubs in Ottery St. Catchpole. Harry got there first, with paranoia that he didn’t bother trying to hide from Draco when he showed up. He raised his eyebrows and glanced at Harry.  
  
“You don’t trust them, even now, do you?” he whispered, his lips barely moving.  
  
Harry shook his head and turned towards the pub door. “No,” he said shortly. “There’s no one who remembers me the way I was, but I’m always waiting for something to remind someone. Or maybe someone _will_ get to know me well enough, the way you did, and break the enchantment. Or maybe someone’s stalking you because of what happened with the mirror. It pays to be safe.”  
  
Draco held the door of the pub for him and put a hand on his back, rubbing low and soothing at the base of Harry’s spine. “That’s another thing I’d like to hear about, too,” he said.  
  
Harry turned back to stare at him, then snorted. “If you don’t watch out, this is going to become an endless recitation of the bad parts of my life,” he muttered, and ducked into the pub, which was small and dark after the bright sunlight outside, but full of corners where he could sit facing the door, luckily. He chose his table, and Draco went up to ask about food and drink. Ron and Hermione came in a minute later.  
  
“But I want to know everything about you,” Draco said, when he came back carrying the food on a collapsible tray that Harry would just _bet_ he’d brought with him. There was a slight hint of magic around the edge, balancing it on the tips of his fingers, but that was the type of thing you’d have to look really hard to see. “Your friends already do, don’t they?” He nodded to Ron and Hermione with a neutral face, even better than the one he’d managed when he met them in Harry’s house as they prepared to go on the wild flight with the decoy robes, and sat down.  
  
“Yeah, we do,” Ron said, and bit into a chip hard enough to send crumbs flying. Hermione rolled her eyes and handed him a napkin that Harry thought might have been conjured, so fast did she pull it out. Ron wiped his face and gave Draco a smile as neutral as his. “Including the parts he might not want to share with anyone.”  
  
“I mind talking about them only because they’re horrible and I don’t want to relive them,” Harry said shortly, and drank slow, long swallows of beer so he could give someone else a chance to speak. But no one did, and in the end, he put down the mug and stared straight at them. “I just—Draco, you know what one side looks like now, from the newspaper articles. Can you take my word for it when I say that it was _awful,_ and leave it at that?”  
  
Draco splayed his fingers in front of him on the table, and studied them for a while. Then he shook his head, but not violently, and looked up to meet Harry’s eyes. “No,” he said quietly. “Not because I disbelieve you. But because I still don’t understand what was so awful that you want to keep the spell up. Do you believe it would start again, if you lowered it?”  
  
“ _Yes_ ,” Harry said, glaring at him. “Of course. And all the worse for the years that they ‘missed’ because I was in hiding.”  
  
Draco leaned back in his chair and looked pensively at Harry. “That’s what I don’t understand, then,” he said at last. “That’s the core and crux of it. Why _couldn’t_ you keep yourself safe? Why did the Ministry never understand how bad it was and help you?”  
  
Ron snorted bitterly, but it was Hermione who answered. “The Ministry was full of fans, too,” she said. “And people who hated Harry. And people who feared him, because of what he did to Voldemort.” She ignored Draco’s flinch so entirely that Harry thought she might simply have missed it. “And people who thought that he needed a good shaking up, or that this is what happens to wizards who save the world. No help would come from there.”  
  
Draco made a restless little movement, and then shook his head again. “You could have done lots of things,” he said. “Defended yourself with traps that would convince anyone trying to come after you that it wasn’t worth it. _Obliviated_ the people who kept reporting on you. Used the Imperius Curse to command the worst offenders to spread indifference about you instead of rumors. Why didn’t you?”  
  
“You haven’t remembered some of the most important things about me, if you need the answer to that.” Harry didn’t find his fish appetizing, but ate steadily for a minute, waiting for Draco to fill in the connections himself. When he kept looking, Harry sighed and spelled it out. “I didn’t want to do anything that would actively hurt people, or get me sent to Azkaban. And Memory Charms do more damage to someone’s brain than a spell like the one I chose. I was still trying to make a compromise with my morals. The spell isn’t a perfect one, but it’s better than what you’re suggesting.”  
  
Draco’s lip drew up a little. Harry didn’t think it was in a smile. “You’re hiding,” he said. “You still want to avoid hurting people, even when they’re out to hurt you.” He shook his head hard, several times now. “I don’t know whether to admire you or to call you cowardly.”  
  
“You can do either,” Harry said evenly. “That’s not something I can control or prevent.” He started eating his chips. They were better than the fish.  
  
“And you won’t consider, even now, dropping the spell and returning to the wizarding world on your own terms?” Draco looked back and forth between Harry and Hermione and Ron, as though he knew they were part of the solution. “I wish you would.”  
  
“Why, though?” Ron asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, maybe just to see Draco flinch. “What’s the point of it? Harry’s happy the way he is. Why should he have to put his life in danger again, for the sake of some people who are never going to be happy no matter what he does?”  
  
“I was thinking that he might want the full freedom of the wizarding world, to which he’s entitled,” Draco murmured, and reached across the table to take Harry’s hand. Harry had been sure that wouldn’t happen with his friends here, and ended up blinking a little and shuffling in place, clearing his throat. Draco smiled at him and dipped his head to breathe a kiss across the back of Harry’s hand. “I was thinking he might want people to know who he is and give him the credit to which he’s also entitled.”  
  
Harry snorted. “You don’t know me well if you think that, Draco. I never wanted any of that attention.”  
  
Draco blinked and frowned at him. “Never? Not even back in school, when you played on your name all the time?”  
  
“That’s the way you remember it,” Harry snapped. He thought about taking his hand back from Draco, but it was possible that Draco really didn’t have any idea of the truth, that his memories were still slowly coming back from the spell, and in the end he left it where it was. “That’s not the way it was.”  
  
“No,” Draco acknowledged slowly, his fingers slipping over Harry’s skin and then going back to his own plate. “Maybe not.”  
  
“So,” Harry said, when a few minutes had passed in silence and it seemed no one else would break it. “Were there any other questions you wanted to ask me, Draco? I can tell you the specifics of the stories that you sent me if you like, but it’s not pleasant telling.”  
  
Draco leaned back in his chair and eyed him. Then he said, “You won’t drop the spell.”  
  
“Would it help,” Harry asked quietly, trying to forget that Ron and Hermione were there and watching him, “if I said again that I don’t _want_ those things that you think I lost? I’m happy just being able to walk down the street and not have people stare at me. That matters far more to me than whether they know that I killed Voldemort or not. Sorry,” he added, when Draco flinched at the name again.  
  
“I think you should be able to _choose_ ,” Draco said, intense as though Ron and Hermione weren’t there, either. “That you should have the whole wide world at your disposal.” He formed his hand into a loose fist and touched the corner of it to Harry’s mouth. “Someone I like should have at _least_ that much.”  
  
Harry smiled in spite of himself. It was nicer to think about it that way, as a gift Draco wanted to give him, rather than as something that Draco wanted to have him for. “Thanks,” he said quietly. “But I really don’t want it.” He hesitated, then plunged recklessly ahead. He had gone this far, he might as well continue. “What do _you_ want, Draco? That I can give you right now.”  
  
Draco glanced at Ron and Hermione. “There are things I want to say that might not be for sensitive Gryffindor ears to hear,” he said.  
  
Harry saw Hermione open her mouth and knew she would suggest remaining with them, but Ron caught her arm and dragged her to her feet. “We’ll take a little walk, then,” he said, and dropped some Muggle money on the table. “If we don’t come back, this should cover it.” He winked at Harry and hurried away.  
  
Draco watched them go, shaking his head. “I would have said that I hated both of them,” he muttered. “Especially when I thought they were so much more famous in the war than they deserved to be. Now, I don’t.”  
  
“Maybe it’s because those memories, the real ones, are still returning?” Harry suggested.  
  
Draco swung his slow gaze back to him. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know.” Then he shook himself and leaned forwards again. “I still want an invitation back to your house, but I know it might be a while before you can give me that.”  
  
Harry nodded, eyes still focused on him, and grateful that Draco seemed inclined to accept the nod.  
  
“I want you to give me _everything_ else,” Draco said. “Public acknowledgment that you’re dating me. The right to owl you whenever I like, and passage of the owl through your wards. An exception to the wards around the Manor, if you’ll take it.” He took a glittering little key out of his pocket and held it towards Harry. It looked like it was made of gold, with tiny diamonds set around the outside of a complicated loop like fragments of teeth.  
  
“That will get me in and out of the wards of the Manor?” Harry asked blankly, picking up the key and turning it over. It was perhaps the most beautiful thing he had ever touched that was purely concrete. Abstract things like freedom didn’t count.  
  
“Yes,” Draco said. “I can’t lower the wards for you. But this will permit you to step in and out of them as if they were a locked door you can open.” He leaned back in his seat, his legs stretched out before him, and if Harry hadn’t spent some time in close quarters with him, he might have missed the way that Draco’s fingers flexed anxiously open and shut, as though he wondered how the gift would be accepted.  
  
“Thank you,” Harry whispered. “ _Thank you_. And everything else you want is yours.” He hesitated for a moment, not even sure what made him hesitate, and then continued, “If—if you’ll tell me why it means that much to you.”  
  
“Because you _affected_ me,” Draco said. “Impressed me with your magic and made me think that you could publish on magical theory, before I knew who you were. Then it turned out you’d tricked me, and known all along who I was, while I had no idea about you.” He inhaled anger, exhaled frustration, and his fingers curled briefly in complex patterns on the table in front of him. “Made it turn out that I had something I’d wanted, and _hadn’t known it._ I’m enraged and baffled and fascinated. I don’t want someone who has that kind of impact on me to get away with me having no impact on him.”  
  
Harry smiled slowly. “That makes sense,” he murmured. “And now I can understand, how you’re different from the people who stalked me and wanted to own me.”  
  
Draco said nothing. He merely tilted his head to the side, waiting.  
  
“They didn’t understand anything about the impact I made on them,” Harry said. “If it wasn’t me, if it was someone else who saved the world, if it was Neville—and it could have been—it would have been the same to them. And they wanted their impact on me to be all-consuming. But you know if you consume me, there won’t be anyone left to return your desire.” He curled his fingers around the key and bent his head to kiss his closed fist, watching Draco all the while. “Thanks. I’ll treasure it.”  
  
Draco smiled. The expression was lazy and torn at the same time, as though Harry had pulled it up from his depths unwilling. Then he reached across the table and caught Harry’s face to bring him close for a kiss.  
  
Harry kissed him back, ignoring the way the pub’s residents stared. They were merely the first people who would know that Harry Potter was dating Draco Malfoy.  
  
For as much as that meant now. For a moment, just a moment, Harry felt a flash of regret that he couldn’t give Draco everything it once _would_ have meant, the gasps of recognition in wizarding society that would have accompanied the joining of their names.  
  
But this way, he was free, in every sense of the word, to return Draco’s affections.  
  
And he thought that, ultimately, Draco would greatly prefer that.


	17. Dating Draco Malfoy

  
“And one, and two, and three…”  
  
Harry pried one eye open, and then turned his head and opened the other. He _had_ to gape at what he was seeing, and frankly, he didn’t think one eye was going to do it the justice it deserved.  
  
Two small owls fluttered in the center of his bedroom, their wings spread and their talons clutching a pure white banner with shining red letters in the middle of it. Harry could make out his own name, in the largest letters of all, but not more without his glasses. He sat up and fumbled for them.  
  
Only then did he notice the third owl, drifting above the other two. Its beak opened and closed, and Draco’s voice came out of it, smaller than usual, but otherwise perfect as always, bright and sharp as a polished knife.  
  
The banner, once Harry got his glasses in place, said, _Happy anniversary of your freedom, Harry._ Harry had barely read that much when the owls began to sing, all of them in Draco’s voices, and eerily in tune with—something. Harry didn’t recognize the tune of the song, actually, though he knew that wouldn’t stop him from enjoying it.  
  
“You have your freedom, and you’re longing for _more._ But what are you going to do for an _encore?_ You’ve controlled the minds of everyone in the wizarding _world._ And you say that your secret will never be _unfurled…_ ”  
  
There was more, but Harry lost the words of the song because he was laughing too hard to talk. He leaned back against his pillows and laughed for at least a minute after the owls had ended their song. He supposed it was rather close to the day four years ago when he and Hermione had worked the spell and no one had known who he was any longer. Trust Draco to notice that when he was sorting through those old newspaper clippings.  
  
The third owl landed on his arm while he was still wiping tears away from his eyes. Harry held it up in front of his eyes and smiled at it. “Tell your master that I enjoyed the performance,” he said.  
  
The owl, nearly as small as Pig, leaned forwards and gently nibbled the bridge of Harry’s nose. Then it took off and flew out the window, while the other owls ducked back through the door, still carrying the banner with them. It was looking rather ragged from the holes that their talons had made in the top.  
  
Harry shook his head, smiled, and cast a _Tempus_ Charm. Around seven in the morning. He wondered if part of the reason Draco had sent the owls this early was to test Harry and see if he would object.  
  
Harry shrugged. Being woken out of sound sleep with a singing message, no matter how silly, was a little different from waking up to a Howler. He didn’t know how he was going to answer it yet, though, and spent some time thinking about that while he showered, got dressed, ate breakfast, and did some more weeding in the gardens.  
  
By the time that Perseus came to visit with an execrable sonnet from George in praise of Harry’s “cleverness,” Harry knew. He offered Perseus several tempting treats to carry a small package to Draco, and by the time that Perseus had finished hooting excitedly and devouring them, the ham sandwich with precisely the right amounts of tomato and mustard was ready. Harry wrapped it up carefully and attached it to Perseus’s leg.  
  
Perseus brought a note back near sunset. _Thank you for the sandwich, Harry. And I expect to see you at the Manor tomorrow morning. I’m having breakfast in the gardens while the elves tend to them, and I would value your professional opinion._  
  
Harry shook his head over the note, and smiled.  
  
*  
  
“Thank you for coming.”  
  
Only when he heard Draco’s voice did Harry realize how fearful Draco had been that he wouldn’t come today. Not that _he_ would categorize it as fearful, of course. More like “properly guarded and careful when it came to his maniac of a lover.”  
  
“You’re welcome,” Harry said, and bounded down the last of the marble steps into the garden. It was beautiful out here, with nearby flowerbeds all organized around certain colors, so that red roses and carnations nodded on one side, and white roses and ghostly orchids of the kind Harry had bought in Diagon Alley on the other. Harry wondered for a moment what it meant that Draco had chosen white and red, and then dismissed it. Other than red being one of the colors of Gryffindor, he couldn’t think of any immediate significance.  
  
Draco rose from his seat at the end of a table between the flowerbeds and held out his hand. Harry came and took it, stroking the sides of Draco’s palm and grinning up at him before he bent his head to kiss the diamond ring Draco wore.  
  
“Wanker,” Draco whispered, but he was smiling.  
  
He wore robes that matched the white flowerbed on his left, Harry’s right, and there must have been a subtle touch of other color to them, too, because he looked as if he were simply a part of the bright gardens rather than washed-out. He guided Harry to a seat on the other side of the small round table, white and made of some shining metal that Harry hadn’t seen before, which wasn’t cold to the touch but so warm that he nearly leaped back up in surprise as he sat down.  
  
“Thank you,” Draco said again, and took his seat. Food began to appear on their plates: a salad that looked as if it were made of emeralds, apples that could have been living rubies, bread halves like broken diamonds, small bowls of butter and cheese that gleamed like gold or at least like lamplight. Draco toyed with a fork and stared at Harry. “I wasn’t sure you would come.”  
  
Harry got up, stepped around the table, and put his hands on Draco’s. Draco blinked up at him and stopped toying with the fork.  
  
“You don’t need to be this nervous,” Harry said quietly. “I’m not going to attack you. I promise. I can swear an Unbreakable Vow or at least make a promise on my wand if that’s what you want, if that would help. I’m not going to get up and storm out of here in a rage.” He wondered a little that Draco could be so nervous when he was the one who had chosen to test the boundaries of their relationship by sending the singing owls to Harry, but he thought he understood after a moment’s more thought. The Manor was the site of their huge quarrel, and Draco had to suspect that Harry had bad memories when he walked through the doors. Memories from the war, even, which he hadn’t known when he first brought Harry here.  
  
“I don’t think you’ll walk away,” Draco said, and laid the fork down precisely beside the plate. “I wonder whether this is a good idea. You think you’re the only one who worries for his possessions and his home, Harry?”  
  
 _Oh._ Harry blinked and sat down on his chair again, although he moved it close enough to continue holding Draco’s hands. He had thought Draco was over that sort of nervousness when he gave Harry the key to the wards, but perhaps he was making a gesture he hoped would be returned rather than anything else.  
  
“I can still promise that I won’t hurt anyone or anything,” he whispered, and smoothed his hands up and over Draco’s wrists. “And you _really_ don’t have to be this nervous. It hurts me to see you that way, Draco.”  
  
Draco raised his eyebrows. “It does?”  
  
Harry nodded. “Uncertainty, confusion…they don’t look good on you. You were born to take command, as I’m sure your ancestors would agree.” He grinned at Draco and leaned in to kiss his cheek.  
  
Draco’s hands came up and seized control of the kiss, redirecting Harry’s mouth to his. Harry parted his lips, and moaned in approval when Draco crushed him close and nearly tipped salad off the plate onto his white robes. Draco kissed him until Harry felt he would melt like the butter, and then leaned back and ran his fingers through Harry’s hair, watching him closely.  
  
“I didn’t think you would let me do that,” he murmured.  
  
Harry shook his head. “I understand why you want to do it, and I’m learning to trust you,” he said. “That’s a _lot_ different from the people who broke into my house and tried to consume me.” He shuddered.  
  
“Are you afraid of them?” Draco murmured, letting Harry slip slowly through his fingers and back to his seat as if he thought that he would collapse if Draco let him go too fast. “Those fans of yours?”  
  
“Yes,” Harry said, and sat down and stretched, touching his lips with one finger and letting Draco see the smile that still lingered on his face. “They can come up, together, with more strategies for hurting me than I can come up with for preventing them.”  
  
Draco hummed under his breath, but said nothing about it for a moment, instead intent on serving Harry with forkfuls of food off his own plate. Harry closed his eyes in delight as he ate some of the salad. The lettuce broke between his teeth with crisp sounds like crunching snow, and the bits of onion and egg and tomato squeaked before exploding into sweetness or tartness, as appropriate. Wherever Draco got his tomatoes, they were even better than the ones that Harry bought and grew.  
  
Then he opened his eyes again, because he found that he didn’t like to go that long without looking at Draco.  
  
Draco, who was cutting up one of the apples to feed slices to both of them, looked up with a faint smile. “Is something wrong?”  
  
“No,” Harry said, and reached out and ran his hand down Draco’s solid arm, touching a muscle here, a ligament there, and then just pausing and digging his fingers into skin for the sheer pleasure of it.  
  
Draco let loose a fierce, pleasant rumble, eyes fixed on Harry’s face. “You shouldn’t do that again unless you want a repetition of what happened in the dining room the last time you were here,” he said.  
  
Harry smiled, to show that he appreciated Draco’s distinction between dining room and bedroom, and took his hand away. Then he lounged back in his chair and opened his mouth, curious to see what Draco would do.  
  
Draco smiled back and finished cutting up the apple, down to fussily peeling off the skin with the paring knife. Then he stood up and came around the side of the table. He pushed the apple slice into Harry’s mouth unhurriedly but inexorably, rather the way that Harry thought he would push his cock in.  
  
Harry accepted it with open lips and lapping tongue, the way that he would try to accept Draco’s cock, and veiled his eyes with his lashes so that he looked up at Draco between them as he ate. The apple was delicious, but the look on Draco’s face as he watched Harry eat it surpassed the taste entirely.  
  
“I don’t know that I can hold back,” Draco whispered, and leaned forwards to kiss him, letting his lips touch the corner of Harry’s mouth lightly, so lightly, as if he were afraid that he might damage something. Then he leaned back and watched him with narrowed eyes, his hands tight fists at his side.  
  
Harry blinked at him. _What are you waiting for?_ he wanted to ask. Perhaps Draco was afraid that any passion Harry experienced would result in random bursts of magic and put his flowers in danger.  
  
Then he knew, and he smiled and reached out to take Draco’s hand with one of his, smoothing it until Draco’s fingers fell open helplessly. “I want it, too,” he said, and turned his head to the side, bowing it, so that he could lay his cheek in Draco’s palm and wait for what Draco would do next.  
  
Draco shoved him, promptly, and Harry fell across the table and felt something sticky clog up his hair, probably one of the cakes that he thought he had seen Draco’s house-elves bringing out of the corner of his eye. He laughed up at Draco, until Draco covered Harry with his body and kissed him until it was fall silent or choke on Draco’s tongue.  
  
Harry hummed and caressed Draco’s hair with one hand while Draco bit his mouth, his neck, his cheeks, and his chest, pulling Harry’s shirt down and almost ripping it to do it. Then Draco stood back and unbuckled his belt. Harry swallowed and opened his mouth, this time making sure that he perfectly mimicked the way he’d looked, or thought he’d looked, when he was waiting for Draco to feed him the slice of apple.  
  
Draco’s cock emerged long and shining, but painful-looking, and he stepped up and put his hand on Harry’s head as though to prevent him from withdrawing. He still rubbed himself across Harry’s lips several times, though, and avoided his darting tongue, before he gave a helpless-sounding grunt and pushed in.  
  
 _If he’s helpless, that makes two of us._ Harry had never felt this way before, and he had a fleeting thought that some of it came from the way Draco held him down, and the sheer angle of his head relative to Draco’s groin.  
  
But more of it came from the pulsing _goodness_ in him when Draco touched him, and his thoughts of the way Draco had touched him since he got here, and the key to the wards, and the way he had _waited._ This was Draco, not any of his past lovers under false pretenses. This was someone he could love.  
  
So he opened his mouth wider, and took in so much that Draco groaned and vibrated on his toes, trying not to trip over the table’s legs, and sucked. Harry paid close attention to the sucking, the way he never had before, shifting his head to the side and relaxing his jaw and making sure to leave his tongue unpredictably longer in certain places than others. He knew he was drooling, knew the saliva was running down from the corners of his mouth around Draco, and didn’t care.  
  
Draco got both hands into his hair and yanked on it. Harry draped his arms flat across the table and hung onto the sides in response, and so Draco managed to pull him further forwards but not so much that he choked.   
  
Draco stared at him with eyes that blazed molten excitement, and Harry stared back and gave a defiant little suck. That just made Draco push in, and down, and hold himself there while he came, a rustling moan shooting out of his mouth.  
  
Harry licked and sucked and swallowed, and reached down with one hand to touch his own groin, finish himself off. Draco’s hand got there first, though, stretching out flat in the air and rebounding Harry’s like somebody keeping him from reaching for another chocolate biscuit.  
  
“No,” he said quietly, in a tone of voice that Harry couldn’t really define, never having heard it before. “This much is mine, I believe.”  
  
Harry blinked at him. Then he let his hand fall to the side, and stared up at Draco, and licked his lips—as much to watch the way that Draco’s eyes followed his tongue as anything else—and smiled.  
  
“Yes,” he said. “It’s yours. _I’m_ yours.”  
  
Draco’s mouth was promptly back on his, so devouring that it hurt. Harry didn’t care. It was more exciting this way. And he _liked_ the feeling of knowing that he had given Draco something he wanted, and he even liked that he’d succeeded in saying that after shying away from it in the past because other people had tried to claim that they owned him.  
  
 _I can belong to other people if I fucking_ want _to. I just choose who._  
  
Draco’s hand curled around him, and held him, and held him up, and roughly stroked him. Harry couldn’t last long enough for Draco to open his trousers, if he’d even been aiming for that. He came instead, and the rush and the brokenness of it were as exciting as the way that Draco curled his hand around him and then pressed his other hand flat against the spreading wet spot, as if he wanted to feel it all.  
  
And the whole time, Draco’s eyes blazed, watching him.  
  
He bent down after Harry had finished and kissed him wet and breathless, then tugged him off the table and laid him down on the ground. A flick of his wand had some of the more persistent nagging aches, like the one in Harry’s jaw, cleared up, and then Draco began taking off his shirt.  
  
“I’m not done with you,” he said, conversationally. “You’re right, I shouldn’t have tried to turn you into a stone statue. It would be _boring_ not to have you made of flesh.”  
  
Harry laughed aloud and rolled over, hands reaching out, snatching. And Draco met him with his shirt still dangling around him, greed for greed and want for want, until they were rolling on the ground and there was a stone in the middle of Harry’s back and his legs ached from spreading them wide and he had a jammed finger from likewise gripping Draco’s legs and spreading them.  
  
 _If this is a typical date, both of us are going to be_ really fit _before the year’s out._  
  
And then Harry didn’t care, because God, Draco could kiss.


	18. Someday Soon

  
Harry could feel the world holding its breath when Draco stepped through the Floo connection into the Weasleys’ house. Or maybe that was only him. He released it and leaned a would-be casual arm on the hearth, scanning the room with one hand on his wand.  
  
Everyone had known Draco was coming, but that was a different thing from seeing him. And Harry’s gaze was particularly on Bill, who had risen from his seat on one side of the enormous kitchen table, holding his daughter Dominique in his arms. The vivid scars on the side of Bill’s face shone like teeth in the warm firelight.  
  
Harry shifted his weight. He heard Ron suck in a single nervous breath, and the silence went on and on, until Draco smiled courteously at Bill and moved forwards with his hand extended.  
  
“I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced,” he said. “My name is Draco Malfoy.”  
  
 _Points for boldness,_ Harry thought, blinking, and knew that everyone in the room would be thinking the same thing. It might still not be enough.  
  
Bill looked at Draco’s hand expressionlessly for a moment, and then nodded and shifted Dominique to the side so that he could reach out and shake it. “Bill Weasley,” he said. He smiled down at Fleur, who had twisted around in her seat to look at them both. “And this is my wife Fleur Delacour-Weasley, and our daughter Dominique, and…” He looked around. “Where has Victoire got to?”  
  
Molly exclaimed and hurried out of the kitchen. There was a general chorus of groans behind her, and Percy and Arthur hurried out to join in the search. The last time Victoire had run away into the house, there had been enough things broken to nearly make Molly have a nervous breakdown.  
  
“My parents had much the same reaction the first time I took a broom out alone,” Draco murmured, nodding at Bill and stepping back to Harry’s side. “The older I grow, the more sympathy I have for their point-of-view.”  
  
Bill let the last bit of tension go out of him, Harry thought, as he smiled. “It depends on the child,” he said, swinging Dominique so she giggled and buried her face in his hair. “And the parent. _This_ one’s not any trouble compared to her sister. Do you have children of your own yet, Malfoy?”  
  
“Not yet.”  
  
Harry blinked. Perhaps no one else saw, because Draco had turned his head to the side as he responded and locked his eyes on Harry, but there was an intensity there that extended a promise. He reached out without thinking and took Draco’s hand.  
  
Draco turned their hands over and touched the middle of Harry’s palm with a single finger, never breaking the gaze, either.  
  
Harry flushed, and knew that some of the eyes watching them were amused. But, well, this was his family, these were his friends, the center of his world since the spell had ensured that most other people didn’t care about who he was. If he couldn’t show off Draco to them, there was no one he could show him to.  
  
And Draco deserved to be shown off.  
  
Harry closed the fingers of his free hand around Draco’s and bowed his head to kiss Draco’s knuckles. Draco moved closer, and they might have done more if Percy hadn’t returned just then with Victoire squirming so hard that she nearly escaped from him. That was the signal that Molly could turn back to cooking, and the table still needed to be set and the food she’d already prepared checked on and drinks fetched for everybody and chairs arranged, and Harry let the whirlwind catch him up and sweep him along.  
  
*  
  
“Pansy, this is my—partner, Harry Potter.”  
  
Harry could hear the audible hesitation before the word Draco chose. Harry had left that choice up to Draco. Whatever he wanted to say, partner or friend or lover or boyfriend, would be fine with Harry.  
  
Pansy Parkinson turned around and nodded to Harry with a kind of cool neutrality that Harry had never seen from a Slytherin before, that he hadn’t even known they were capable of. She had grown into a taller woman than Harry had thought she would, taller than Draco, with long, flowing hair to the middle of her back and slender glasses perched on her nose. Harry smiled at her and waited, less nervous than he knew Draco had been in the middle of the Burrow. He, at least, had the protection of the spell. It wouldn’t make Draco’s friends like him, but it would prevent them from hating him.  
  
“It’s strange,” Pansy said at last, in a voice that seemed compressed flat. Harry wondered if it was for his benefit or if she naturally talked like that.  
  
“What is?” Harry asked, when Draco remained silent and tense at his side.  
  
“I never thought anyone would make Draco so much as struggle for a word like that.” Pansy smiled, a baring of teeth that made Harry wonder what sort of terrifying reporter for the _Prophet_ she must make. Supposedly she was going to take over Rita Skeeter’s job when Skeeter retired. Pansy finally stepped forwards around the small round table she had kept between them in her kitchen and held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you, then. Did you go to Hogwarts?”  
  
“I did, but a year behind you,” Harry said, using the lie he and Draco had agreed on, and took her hand, smiling. “You wouldn’t have had a reason to notice me.”  
  
Pansy looked him full in the face and then gave him a more leisurely appraisal that caused Draco, Harry thought, to stiffen for another reason. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “Those eyes…oh, well.” She shrugged, and glanced at Draco. “Congratulations, Draco.” Her fingers began to move across Harry’s palm.  
  
“No,” Draco said, and he and Pansy engaged in a silent staring contest that must have a million emotions at the bottom of it. Harry gently eased his hand free of Pansy’s.  
  
Pansy finally twitched her head down a little, and said, “Oh, well done. Yes, fine. If you want.” She turned and walked away into a small room attached to the kitchen, where Harry could hear her talking to someone who sounded like a house-elf.   
  
Draco swallowed hard and ran a hand through his hair. “Bloody Pansy,” he said, voice so absent that Harry thought it was something he probably said every time he visited this house and didn’t even notice anymore.  
  
 _Harry_ didn’t know why he said it, though, and he wanted to. He wanted to know why Draco had tensed and flinched not at the noise of a firework George had set off at dinner last night, but at the brilliant blue light. He wanted to know why Draco so often lightly turned the conversation away from himself when he would have been perfectly happy to discuss his own thoughts at Hogwarts. He wanted to know where he had gained the skill at wielding his wand with both hands that Harry had noticed in the last few days, as though he didn’t have a dominant one. Or as though he no _longer_ had a dominant one, anyway.  
  
There were so many things he wanted to know that Harry really doubted one lifetime would be enough.  
  
“What do you mean?” he asked.  
  
Draco started, and glanced at him. “Oh,” he said. “Pansy really does believe that I’ll never stay with anyone who doesn’t know the important things about me, like being an Unspeakable, or at least can _forgive_ the important things about me. And she didn’t believe that I would tell them, either. So now she wanted to see if I was serious about you, and touched you. I let her know I wasn’t sharing.”  
  
Harry laughed in spite of himself. “You’ll have to teach me how you have entire conversations like that with your eyes,” he said.  
  
“It’s a lot easier,” Draco said, leaning nearer and lowering his voice, “when you and the other person have an actual _history_.”  
  
Harry stiffened, but met Draco’s eyes, flicked his wand to raise a Privacy Charm, and said, “Do you blame me for wanting to hide from your friends the first time I meet them?”  
  
“No,” Draco said. “But this is the first time I’ve watched one of them not know you, and it’s disturbing. You know what I think, Harry. What I think you should do.”  
  
Harry nodded shortly. “And it’s not that I have no discomfort with the spell, Draco. But I am afraid that no matter what precautions we set up, they’d get torn down by a Ministry and paper not on my side.”  
  
Draco glanced into the side room where Pansy had gone. “She could make sure the papers were on our side.”  
  
Harry rubbed his hand over his face, and didn’t answer. He knew that Pansy hadn’t been in a position four years ago to do such a thing, but she might be now. Just as Skeeter might have found some new obsession now, and people who had cared about him because he seemed like their vision of a perfect hero might now reject him because he had proven that he was cowardly enough to hide.  
  
He thought back to the sense of threat he had lived with day and night: no room he could consider private because someone would break in, no possession he could get attached to because someone would steal it, nothing he could _do_ because the legal means of protecting himself were denied to him and he wouldn’t do something illegal.  
  
He felt a sharp, painful pressure on his left wrist, and opened his eyes. Draco was pinching the skin there, staring at him.  
  
“You looked as if you were starting a panic attack,” Draco said. “It was—it was that bad?”  
  
Harry nodded. “Nothing I could own, nothing I could do, nowhere to hide,” he said, and then managed a faint smile. “Why do you think I’m so obsessed by having those heavy wards around my house?”  
  
Draco didn’t smile back this time, his eyes narrowed. “I would protect you,” he said. “You know that. If only to stop people from harming you or taking you away from me when you’re clearly _mine_.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “I know you would try,” he said. “But I don’t think it would be enough. And just one close encounter with a fan of the kind that wanted to kiss me and kill me and possess me and make me theirs—someone I didn’t _choose_ to be with, the way I would with you—could make me snap. I don’t want someone’s death on my hands.”  
  
“There are ways to handle even that,” Draco said, his eyes growing heavy and satisfied-looking. “Blaise is a lawyer—”  
  
“But imagine what a circus the trial would be,” Harry said flatly. “Always someone shouting and screaming at me, and a _lot_ more chances for someone to hide in the crowds and harm me. So, no, thanks.”  
  
“You have to stop hiding eventually,” Draco said. “If you want all the credit that you deserve.”  
  
“I _don’t_.”  
  
His declaration this time seemed to have some force that his others didn’t. Draco stepped back from him and looked him up and down in the way that Pansy had. Then he blinked and dropped Harry’s hands. Harry winced, but held his eyes. He hoped that Draco wasn’t about to walk away from him, but if they owed each other one thing at this point, it was complete honesty about what they wanted. If Draco found the thought of being with someone so unambitious repulsive, then he should go.  
  
“I didn’t quite believe that before,” Draco said. “I thought, well, you must want the fame but not the consequences that came with it, which is understandable and believable. If you could remove those consequences, surely you would want the attention back?”  
  
Harry snorted. “No. The spell had to move some of my fame to other people simply to work, but I’m glad that it had to. Hermione and Ron always deserved more credit than they got, and so did Neville. Now they can have it and enjoy it diminished enough that no one tries to stalk them. Well, all right, so someone did go after Ron last year, but he could handle it. There was—it’s better when there’s more than one person to share it. The respect that they wanted to pay me was distorted and unnatural.”  
  
Draco did some more staring. Then he said, “One reason I don’t talk a lot about becoming an Unspeakable is that it sounds too strange to other people. They want to understand us as purely wizards who gather Dark artifacts to protect others from them or wizards obsessed with understanding the Dark. Not both.”  
  
Harry nodded, and smiled. He had at least part of an answer as to why Draco had become an Unspeakable, then. If he’d sensed that double nature in himself, it would have been hard to associate with purely Light or purely Dark wizards.  
  
“And I think I understand your reason for the spell a little better now,” Draco said, laying his hand along his cheek. “You did something great, but it didn’t feel that way from the inside.”  
  
“It felt _laborious,_ ” Harry said. “But I couldn’t just walk away and leave Voldemort to eat the whole wizarding world, could I? And people were always telling me that it was my destiny, so I went along with it. But that’s different from deciding that I was going to do it simply because it was the right thing to do.”  
  
“That’s mixed in with it,” Draco said, head half-lowered, his eyes bearing that satisfied look again. “I know you now, Harry Potter.”  
  
“Yes, from the _inside_ ,” Harry said, lowering his voice, and was astonished to see Draco blush. It was a faint, fleeting mark of color high on his cheeks, but Harry had seen it once, and now he wanted to see it again.  
  
“Yes, mixed in,” Harry continued. “But it’s different from being a pure hero, or even someone who does the right thing because they’re the only person in that time and place who can.” Draco opened his mouth to argue, but Harry shook his head impatiently. “I _had_ to do it. I didn’t choose to save someone I never met, like a real hero. And I’ve never liked people staring at me. When I was a kid, it was because I felt so strange, and then I went to the wizarding world and I felt strange for a different reason. So. No more fame.”  
  
“Forever?” Draco’s hand was lightly playing with Harry’s, as though he was thinking about taking it up again.  
  
“For right now,” Harry said. “Someday soon, maybe.”  
  
“Well, this _is_ fascinating.”  
  
Harry lifted his head. He had felt free to talk because the spell would keep Pansy from understanding what he was speaking about and the Privacy Charm would prevent her from overhearing most of it anyway, but he had thought he would hear her come back into the room, at least. Evidently she’d done it, and removed the Privacy Charm, without alerting him. She stood with her hands on her hips and her foot tapping the floor, gaze locked on Harry.  
  
“Like the Boy-Who-Lived, but not him,” she said. “And something about a spell, and something about the way that Draco stands next to you holding onto his wand tells me that speculation isn’t welcome right now.” She turned and marched smartly through an arched doorway into the next room, which was probably a dining room.  
  
Harry snorted and glanced at Draco. There was no murderousness in that expression, to him, but then, he might be used to seeing less sophisticated varieties of it.  
  
“She’ll really drop it for right now?” Harry asked.  
  
Draco nodded. “That’s one thing friends can do for each other,” he said, and shifted his arm around Harry’s waist. “Or lovers.”  
  
Harry turned and rested his nose against Draco’s neck. He was sure that Draco wouldn’t give up trying to get him to remove the spell, but at least he understood why Harry might want to keep it, and Harry had breathing room to think and come up with arguments.  
  
Or with reasons to yield to Draco’s.  
  
Perhaps that was what was most special about Draco, that he had come into Harry’s life and made him _want_ to change his mind, instead of simply feeling that he should or that he had every right to remain firm and stubborn.  
  
“Good,” he said. “Then let’s go have something to eat.”  
  
Draco walked with him into Pansy’s dining room, his fingers teasing at the cloth of Harry’s shirt, but absent-mindedly, since they had far more time to have sex later. Harry leaned his head on Draco’s shoulder and closed his eyes.  
  
More time for everything.  
  
Even for fame, maybe.  
  
 **The End.**


End file.
